My server is reporting the above message at the end of every recording that is set to remove commercials. This is a windows server on Win7 and the message seems to be a generic windows message, not something reported by the Plex Server. All of my library file, including recordings are located on a WD NAS. In the “scheduled recordings” window all of these recordings report “an error occurred while postprocessing the recording”, with a yellow triangle and “!” symbol. For a brief recent history, I was on the beta update channel mistakenly(thought I moved public once that included DVR) and I noticed the “remove commercials” feature on my server. Soon after that I searched the forum and realized I had picked up the beta but not before I had recorded at least one 2-hour program with the commercial removal selected(I guess I was victim of the default “on” for that update). Realizing that all my recording were now set to remove commercials with this beta feature I rushed to change the setting on my recordings because I didn’t want to be in the beta anyways(I had recently picked up using MCEBuddy). The accidental 2-hour program seemed to skip the commercials perfectly and over the next few days I monitored the forum to see what results folks were reporting. It seemed like folks were having good success so I decided to go in and reset my recordings(mostly series recordings) to remove commercials. It seems now that every recording with this setting turned on is not being postprocessed because the “plex commercial skipper.exe” program stops working for some unknown reason. I haven’t found anyone reporting this same issue so I thought I should ask about it here.
Thanks in advance for any assistance. Logs attached.
EDIT: I should mention that the recordings do move into my library at full length but only after I acknowledge the “stopped working” message, with choices of “look for solutions online” or “close the program”.
Do you still have your MCEBuddy scripts enabled? Perhaps there’s an interruption occurring.
My MCEBuddy was just monitoring folders to convert, I didn’t have a postprocessing script in Plex to queue MCEBuddy, if I understand your question.
Honestly I’ve never used MCEBuddy… but if it’s attempting to grab the file, perhaps even read from it before Plex’s comskip can begin its process… it could be causing a conflict. It’s just a guess though.
That was a fair guess and prompted me to re-think the relationships because it reminded me that I recently noticed MCEBuddy was queuing items while still in the .grab folder. The .grab folder(where recordings are cached while recording) is usually a hidden folder and that made me wonder if Windows was configured to show hidden files/folders, which it turns out it was. I assume MCEBuddy has picked them up because they haven’t been moved out, pending the “…stopped working” error, but they have been released from use by Plex, yet can be “seen” by MCEBuddy. So I’ve “hidden” the hidden folders again and stopped MCEBuddy from monitoring. The first test still resulted in the same errors. I’ll run some more tests to see if I can make a relationship apparent.
Ran a test to record the last 16 minutes of a broadcast and set it to remove commercials. I watched the resource monitor and saw the ‘plex commercial skipper.exe’ start up and seemed to begin the process. It ran for about 2 minutes or so(possibly long enough to convert this short recording) and was using 35-48% of the CPU when suddenly the use drop to zero and the “…stopped working” message arrived on the server screen.
In a separate instance, I noticed a recording from two nights ago did not error out. I checked to be sure the commercials were removed and indeed this one hour show was cut down to 40 minutes. The cuts were not great (the first 15 seconds or more were trimmed) but it does seem to have worked successfully.
It doesn’t seem to be an issue with maxing out the CPU(since all processes did not exceed 55-60%) although I am concerned what will be the outcome when 4 programs end at the same time; I don’t think my processor could handle 4 times that. But I suspect these recording are being queued behind each other and only one processed at a time, based on the fact that each is delayed a few minutes after the other in reporting the postprocessing error.
I looked at my logs for clues. I found a message that the edl file failed to be created[or something like that; logs attached]. The only thing I could think of that my environment may not be the best at was some sort of error in the network traffic causing problems with creating that file. Digging further I was able to watch the .grab folder at the end of a recording and see Plex creating a few .txt files in the first 2-3 minutes after a recording completes, followed by the creation of an edl file. Within 1-2 minutes of the edl appearing, the server throws the message “Plex commercial skipper.exe has stopped working”.
I watched the process for 5 recordings saved to the servers internal hard-drive and all of the recording completed the full process with commercials removed. When I shift the save location back to the NAS drive I get the “…stopped working” message 95% of the time. The files stay in the .grab folder until I dismiss the “…stopped working” message; at which point the recording with commercials is moved into the library.
The attached logs are just after recording “The price is right” to the NAS and receiving the “…stopped working” error message.
