hello, i’m trying to play a movie that’s about 20 gigs and disk and i’m getting the error “Not enough disk space to convert item”
I’m using Arch linux if that is helpful!
Thank you
Jason
I’m having the same problem.
looks like you don’t have enough free space on your transcoder drive. With recent updates, there is a requirement to have free space equal to the size of the movie + 100MB (or 200MB, I’ve seen both numbers used).
You can change the location of the transcoder directory in the Plex server settings.
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I had the same problem and found that field with path to temporary transcoder’s folder is empty. After filling it with path, problem was solved.
Cannot say if this field was filled before.
Plex 1.0.1.2396, Ubuntu 10.04
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@Slashik what is the path then?
@“Saeed’s Corner” said:
@Slashik what is the path then?
When it’s blank, it uses the default location, which obviously in your cases doesn’t have enough space.
When you enter a value, it uses that location in preference to the default - so make it where ever you want, just ensure it has heaps of space free (at least the size of the movie you are trying to watch + a few 100 meg)
Can we override this setting?
@egrimisu said:
Can we override this setting?
Yes, you can. The setting is in Settings > Transcoder:
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Thanks for > @sander1 said:
@egrimisu said:
Can we override this setting?Yes, you can. The setting is in Settings > Transcoder:
Thanks for the answer but I want to overide the free space limiation and not to specify another folder for temporary encode.
@egrimisu said:
Thanks for the answer but I want to overide the free space limiation and not to specify another folder for temporary encode.
You can’t, and you don’t want to. if the transcoder doesn’t have the temp space it needs, the media will just stop playing mid stream.
@egrimisu said:
Thanks for the answer but I want to overide the free space limiation and not to specify another folder for temporary encode.
And when it completely fills the drive space and crashes the server, what have you achieved? Not a good idea.
Ok, I think that you are anwsering without really getting all the viez. I have lets say 30Gb of free space, because of one encode the remaining free space it is lets say 15GB but the user is at 90% of the movie. Meanwhile another user starts playing a 16gb file. Basicaly i can assume that the first user will finish playing the movie and the second one will have it’s free space for the needed encode as the cache files will be freed as soon as the first user finish his play.
Since i use a monitoring solution for info and statistics I can surely tell that my disc was never filled using the older plex version that did not have this limitation and sometime all the family members are on the server playing movies via encode and in rushhours I have around 5-6 simultaneous encodes. Never had and issue till upgrading to the latest version.
So let’s say I would like to take the risk and ignore the free space. If plex is not desinged or atleast the “under the hood” options are locked to standard user may I know what function is using plex to get the free space of the partition where plex is doing his encodes under Linux? df, dfree? If it is using one of these I can manage to modidy them to report how much free space I would like 
Maybe a delete encoding stream that have been allready played on the devides will be a good function in order to preserve free space.
@egrimisu said:
Ok, I think that you are anwsering without really getting all the viez. I have lets say 30Gb of free space, because of one encode the remaining free space it is lets say 15GB but the user is at 90% of the movie. Meanwhile another user starts playing a 16gb file. Basicaly i can assume that the first user will finish playing the movie and the second one will have it’s free space for the needed encode as the cache files will be freed as soon as the first user finish his play.Since i use a monitoring solution for info and statistics I can surely tell that my disc was never filled using the older plex version that did not have this limitation and sometime all the family members are on the server playing movies via encode and in rushhours I have around 5-6 simultaneous encodes. Never had and issue till upgrading to the latest version.
So let’s say I would like to take the risk and ignore the free space. If plex is not desinged or atleast the “under the hood” options are locked to standard user may I know what function is using plex to get the free space of the partition where plex is doing his encodes under Linux? df, dfree? If it is using one of these I can manage to modidy them to report how much free space I would like
Maybe a delete encoding stream that have been allready played on the devides will be a good function in order to preserve free space.
Does anyone have a solution for my request?
What is it encoding if you’re playing content natively?
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I’m getting this issue on my unraid server all the time even though I have enough free space to convert. Really annoying. I restart the plex container and then it works again.
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Hello, I’m having this exact problem but the fix is not working. I was trying to play a movie that was 17.7 gigs and the default transcoder directory only had 14 gig of free space. So I followed these instructions and changed the transcoder directory to another drive which has 347 gigs of free space but I still am getting the error ‘Not Enough Disk Space to Convert this Item’ Are there any ideas why this is happening?
1 Like
Same here now. 100G+ available on system drive and storage drive. What’s going on?
Suddenly same for me. Doesn’t matter if i change the temp transcode directory to a drive with enough free space either, the 18 GB movie I’m trying to play just won’t due to “not enought disk space to convert”… First time I’ve seen this.
I’m still in Version 1.3.2.3112, and was having the same issue. Since I run Plex server in a virtual machine, and allocating more local storage would mean ballooning the size of the VM, I created a stripped network share folder in a Storage Spaces server. Just make sure your Plex user has write permission to the network share path you enter as temporary folder.
BTW, While transcoding in original quality, the Plex temporary folder kept an average size of 2.5 GB. I think requiring temporary folders to have the same size as the full length movie is way overkill and should be reversed back.
I don’t know why is not working for you guys but it did work for me. I’m in Version 1.3.3.3148.
