Mac PMS 1.29.1.6276 Crashed (First Ever), Seems Corrupted Library & or Host Files—1.28 Now Unstable

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

PMS for Mac 1.29.1.6276 Crashed—First Time Ever
PMS dedicated host Mac:

  • 27" iMac (Mid 2010) 2.93GHz i7 (4 core) 20GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5750 GPU
  • macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra)
  • Impacts all players: Mac, Apple TV, iOS, iPadOS

Summary:

  • PMS for Mac 1.29.1.6276 crashed—1st ever for us (beginning Mar 2022)
  • Creates Spurious TV Shows Episode Entry—looks like dup, but plays previous season show
  • Appears to Persistently Corrupt Library and or other host TV Shows database files
  • Reverting back to 1.28.2.6151 does not remedy apparent host corruption

Our PMS for Mac host is dedicated to PMS local LAN use only. The PMS library is on a dedicated 12TB local drive with >6TB free space. The PMS for Mac internal boot (Startup) volume drive has >300GB free space. (That PMS host boot volume was initialized (“reformatted”) immediately before the first PMS installation.)

I installed PMS for Mac 1.29.1.6276 yesterday as always: manually quitting PMS 1.29.1.6260 from its Mac Menu, replaced the PMS for Mac application, launched PMS from a contextual menu Open, authenticated, ran PMS for ~30 minutes, and then restarted the PMS for Mac host.

Before and after PMS host restart, every Plex functionality appeared normal, both from use via Plex for Apple TV, Plex for iOS, and Plex for Mac.

~35 hours after the PMS host restart, PMS for Mac 1.29.1.6276 crashed while my wife was watching (using Plex for Apple TV 8.9 via 1Gbps 6’ total Ethernet connections to same Ethernet switch) a OTA Live TV show being recorded.

None of the three OTA Live TV shows being recorded appear to have been retained. :frowning:

The PMS for Mac host did not hang, nor show any apparent issues when PMS crashed.

I do not recall any of the roughly 14 versions of PMS crashing since I first installed PMS for Mac ~19 March 2022.

1 Like
2

Nice job keeping that mid 2010 running for 12 years. You may find that parking your PMS at the last stable version of 1.28 is your best option.

3

Having found two bugs with 1.29.6276, I reverted back to PMS 1.28.2.6151.

1 Like
4

Can you fill me in on your OS version for the Vintage iMac is it high sierra

5

Yes—macOS 10.13.6 (High Sierra)

6

I’ve been running Plex on our 2020 M1 Mac mini for almost two years now. It’s been by far the most stable Plex experience we’ve ever had. It just runs. Until this version. I also am running 1.29.1.6276. This is also the very first time that we’ve had issues with Plex on MacOS. It’s randomly crashing. No warning, no issues at all from the Mac for us either, as the OP mentioned. Oddly, in our case, most of the time it’s crashed has been when we weren’t actively watching. It’s just there one minute and gone the next and when we try to access our library it’s disappeared from the interface. Restarting has worked so far, but it’s been crashing again a short time later. I’ve had at least two of these episodes in the last 8 hours.

I’m assuming this is a bug in the current stable version. We also noticed that there were several Plex updates over the last few weeks. Is there anyway of knowing when the next version will be released?

7

I would advice, if it’s crashing that regularly roll back to a known version of stability.

1 Like
8

@raevengel
Please test out the Plex Pass forum special PMS Transcoder Preview.
It works exactly like any other PMS, except it’s highly optimized for Apple Silicon.
I’ve run it since it came out without any hiccups, and if that crashes they want to know.

1.29.x has been very bleeding edge on other hardware, but on an M1 or M2 it’s amazing.

The most conservative advice is to lock your system down at PMS 1.28.2.6151 until after new years, but in this case, it’s worth trying. If you have issues post logs in a new thread and ping me and SE56 with the @ thingy.

2 Likes
9

The only issue with using the preview, it purges all updates before 1.29 from root Library. So I would make a copy of 1.28.2.6151 prior as a backup

1 Like
10

explain please

1 Like
11

@nibbles, thanks so much for responding! Could you please share a little more about a couple of things you mentioned:

  1. you said 1.29.x has been very bleeding edge on other hardware but amazing on M1/M2 Macs. Are you having good experiences running the current stable version of 1.29.x on Apple silicon? I’m wondering if my experience is what others have had or an anomaly.

  2. Is the PMS Transcoder Preview a beta of the PMS with a new transcoding engine or is it something altogether different? The name PMS Transcoder kind of threw me, so not sure what it is exactly. GREAT to hear that it’s being highly optimized for Apple silicon.

My one and only concern about the preview is that we have to be out of town for awhile and we always enjoy using Plex on the road. I want to be sure that whatever version I leave installed while we’re gone, will be as rock solid as it was during the last trips we’ve taken. Seriously, before our Mac mini, we’d never make it a full trip without Plex (or the computer it ran on) crashing and losing connection so we couldn’t access our server/content till we were home again. I’ve become spoiled by the PMS/macOS rock solid combo. :smiley:

12

It’s been perfect.

Yes it’s a beta of PMS with some code enhancements for hardware transcoding on Apple Silicon.

Stick with the last stable 1.28.2 for maximum stability, and turn off auto upgrades.
It was called PlexMediaServer-1.28.2.6151-914ddd2b3-universal.zip

$ shasum PlexMediaServer-1.28.2.6151-914ddd2b3-universal.zip 
2cf82b505fe43a888164eb0d3bd1f33a8f546a4c  PlexMediaServer-1.28.2.6151-914ddd2b3-universal.zip

Locking things down that work is always a good idea around the holidays :slight_smile:

1 Like
13

Actually, @nibbles , I think I might be able to help on that from another thread I posted earlier trying to follow up on suggestions given here. I use the Plex auto updater which simply brings up an update screen on our AppleTV Plex app and says something like “hey, an new version of Plex is available (giving the new number), do you want to update now”? You can choose to update now, defer to overnight, or skip the version entirely. But if you update then, it takes under 2 minutes and there’s no installing whatsoever to do - the PMS for Mac handles everything under the hood.

Because of this, I don’t have any previous versions of PMS to roll back to so I posted asking where to (safely) get a copy of the last stable version, since I don’t want to inadvertently download a compromised version, even from a reputable download site. Apparently, this update process downloads each version and keeps them in the root PMS directory on one’s Mac (I don’t know about other OS’s). Anyway, I learned all ihave to do is get the previous version from my own system as it kept a copy. I think what @SE56 is saying is that ALL those previous versions are wiped out when installing the preview version. So, if one wants to get/keep a copy of any previous versions, we should save them to a safe (and different) folder before installing the PMS preview.

Here’s the thread which has more info and details: Where to (safely) download previous versions of PMS for MacOS?

2 Likes
14

From my experience pre 1.29 were purged, is correct. This occurred after installing the Preview

1 Like
15

Reverting back to PMS for Mac 1.28.2.6151 did NOT fix problems and or host file corruption.

Initially, it appeared that reverting back to PMS 1.28.2.6151 remedied the spurious TV Shows episode entry bug. Upon initial PMS 1.28.2.6151 launch, the spurious episode entries were no longer displayed.

That evening, PMS for Mac 1.28.2 6151 crashed, just like PMS 1.29.1.6260.

Several days later, it is clear that reverting back to PMS 1.28.2.6151 did not help. It appears that persistent, perhaps permanent host file damage has occurred.

Now, instead of there being two entries for some recorded TV Shows, only the previously seen spurious (bogus) entry is displayed (ie, the actual recorded show can NOT be played, rather only the show from last season).

In my previous posting, I annotated a spurious The Late Show With Stephen Colbert season 8 episode 15 entry:

  • 15 - Nancy Pelosi; Armando Iannucci — {actual recording display entry}
  • 15 - Episode 15 — {bogus display entry}

The displayed episode frame is the same (ie, an image of Nancy Pelosi) and the Get Info data for both entries’ recording source file list the same macOS file:

  • TV Shows/
  • The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (2015)/
  • The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (2015) - S08E15 - Nancy Pelosi; Armando Iannucci.ts

However, the Get Info source file entry does not appear to be the actual Library link, as clicking upon the spurious (bogus) entry causes a previous season show (the season 7 first show entry displayed, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock) to be played.

16

@pl4151 sorry to hear about that. I reread your OP also.
would you set PMS into debug mode & save changes,
restart PMS and wait 5min,
then use the hosted web app go to
Settings → Troubleshooting → Download Logs
zip and drop them into your reply please.
We can look at the errors being logged.

17

Does anyone have a copy of PMS 1.28.2x? I checked my updates folder and all three versions are 1.29x, so I’m thinking it only keeps the last three versions and 1.28x was overwritten. PMS 1.29x is now crashing multiple times a day and I really need a stable version before we travel.

Thanks!

18

There’s a link a few posts above to a thread about howto safely find previous PMS on some website. Because I gave you the real SHA hash above that, you can verify whatever you download matches that using the sha command. I’m struggling too with an older 2018 Mini and 10.14.6.

19

Feeling really stupid and a little crazy…

Tried to roll back Plex. Unzipped, allowed system to move to Applications folder - while Plex was closed. Reopened and VOILA! Rolled back to 1.26.2x. I thought I was set.

Then Plex threw an error saying it couldn’t connect to the server securely so I simply refreshed by browser page (web interface). When it refreshed, it connected without issue - and now the version is back to the newest version: 1.29.1.6316. What did I do wrong? And why was it using the previous version then it suddenly changed? I’m super confused. Any pointers would be very helpful. Thanks!

20

Sorry for the delay. Plex has an update feature that could go off during scheduled maintenance.
You can probably check the settings for it in your plist with

defaults read com.plexapp.plexmediaserver

When auto updates are enabled I see the following:

In the gui

Server Version Update

In the plist

$ defaults read com.plexapp.plexmediaserver | grep Butler
    ButlerEndHour = 12;
    ButlerStartHour = 1;
    ButlerTaskGenerateAutoTags = 0;
    ButlerTaskRefreshLibraries = 1;
    ButlerTaskReverseGeocode = 0;
    ButlerTaskUpdateServer = always;
    ButlerTaskUpdateVersionSkipped = "1.29.1.6316-f4cdfea9c";
    ButlerUpdateChannel = 8;

If you were to stop PMS and delete the ButlerTaskUpdateServer you would turn off autoupdates.

defaults delete com.plexapp.plexmediaserver ButlerTaskUpdateServer
1 Like