Multiple Plex Transcoders running for the same Movie! Plex Version 1.18.1.1973

General Discussions
1

Hi,
I just noticed that my server power consumption was a tad high and thought I had better see what was going on. Nothing was showing in Plex dashboard so I remote logged into my windows server and brought up task manager. There was 5 plex transcoders all running for the exact same movie. I have seen this same issue before a few weeks back with another movie, both instances are related to my friends streaming remotely and both via XBOX Ones. I think the XBOX One might be more than a coincidence as both friends used to stream on Fire Stick and iPad previously and I never saw this issue.

Just as I was typing I’ve seen two entries for the same tv show pop up from my friends sole XBOX one, I’ve managed to grab a screen shot.

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Is there some bug in the Plex XBOX client which is causing multiple transcoders to run simultaneously on my server, perhaps triggered when streaming quality is changed?

From the picture I can see both are running at different resolutions, so it appears my mate is dropping the bitrate down I guess, unless happening automatically. However my server is fixed at 720P for remote streams, so no idea how the 1080p stream should have even started to play.

My Plex Version 1.18.1.1973 and running on Windows Server 2019 Essentials.

I should also mention a few months back I dropped the “Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than” down from the default, to 10 mins. I noticed transcoding was continuing in the background for paused shows for over 30 mins I think, which was a waste of earths resources, but not sure if this has any impact on the problem, might be a complete red herring.

Any ideas on this one, I’m not sure what logs have been captured as I have most of it turned off, but I will check now?

Quick update on log situation, there is nothing meaningful captured, so have turned on debug logging, will try and do some testing with my friend tomorrow to try and replicate the issue.

Cheers
S.

2

Yeh, I have noticed this behavior for my other friends XBOX as well… One of the offending streams is always a 0bps stream, and kills itself after 5 minutes or so… I haven’t checked through task manager yet, but the 0bps stream is always a DirectPlay stream, and the other stream is always a transcode stream… So it’s not transcoding multiple times in my instance… and from the screenshot above, it doesn’t look like it’s doing it in yours either… Though I typically Monitor with Tautulli cause it gives more information

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3

Seems I’m not the only one and my friend just sent me this link too showing the exact same symptoms.

Looks like Plex developers breaking stuff again, they need to work smarter on their testing, shouldn’t be releasing these types of issues to the public beta channel, should be caught during internal testing.

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Bump… just got the same issue happening again, fault with the XBOX client, although the server should terminate rogue plex transcoder streams anyway.

My server version is now 1.18.3.2129

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it typically ends the duplicate stream after 3-5 minutes for me…

6

Is there any update to this issue, just checked my server and got 6 orphaned Plex transcoders running because of the buggy Xbox Plex app?

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