Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488 on Windows 7 Pro
Player Version#: iOS iPad Pro latest version
I’ve noticed that some remote plays are not showing as “Now Playing” or in fact logging anything in the plex logs. I even tried turning up logging from DEBUG to VERBOSE but still nothing was logged.
Background
My dad (a remote user) has been complaining that sometimes, his “Recently Played Movies” list on his iPad Pro was not showing up things he had watched. He also said that movies he had part-watched were starting from the beginning when he went back to them.
I also run PlexPy and can confirm some movies he has watched were missing.
Last night, I was watching a TV show locally and I had 2 remote users watching movies. These showed as Now Playing. However, I noticed that there were 3 transcodes running in Windows Task Manager when there should have been 2 (I run a Nvidia Shield client locally and it direct plays everything I throw at it). So, I did some more digging as saw that the additional transcode was for a movie not showing in Now Playing. So, I checked the “Plex Media Server.log” file and that too did not show the transcode. I then phoned my dad and he confirmed he was watching the movie I could see being transcoded and it was working fine from his end.
So, my question is how can a remote user be watching a movie that is being transcoded by Plex but not showing as Now Playing or being logged in “Plex Media Server.log”? Why does this only happen some of the time (some of my dad’s activities do log)?
I am seeing a similar issue. However, my server is running on ubuntu 18.04 and the client is fire tv app. The client is streaming fine, but from server perspective, it does not appear the client is connected. There are other fire tv app clients running and they seem to be behaving as expected (watched status updating and server recognizing the connection). Is this related to a recent update?
I imagine that other ppl have this issue too but are not aware of it. You only become aware of it if you see a transcode process running when there is meant to be no activity. As it’s only intermittent too, I can imagine this affecting many users without their knowledge.
Same issue here…I just discovered it today while trying to check what kind of transcoding was going on for a show…Streaming from Win 10 to an Iphone…no activity on the server but of course the plex transcoder is active in the task manager…I exited plex via the task bar and shut the server down and the show continued playing until the buffer ran out and then I got the gold circle spinning… I restarted the server and when it was up and running the show jumped back to the previous resume point from when I most recently started playing it. There was still no indication that the server was transcoding anything via the dashboard.
In general this should never happen; in practice, a badly behaved client may fail to report to the server what it’s doing (e.g. if a client just streams an MKV and doesn’t report via timelines, it’ll likely be invisible in Now Playing).
If anyone can reproduce the issue with an official client, please let us know, and post server logs along with details about the invisible client and we’ll have a look.
It happens on the latest official iPad client for sure. I have a server on Windows 10 and one on Ubuntu 19 and the iOS client is occasionally invisible to both servers. Nothing is logged with Debug and/or Verbose switched on. The only way I know it is happening (as the client is remote) is by seeing the files being read from the server and then manually confirming with my dad who’s iPad is affected. When this happens, he notices if he stops playback and restarts, the media starts from the beginning again also.
It happens on the official AppleTV Client as well, unfortunately I have not found a way to reproduce it yet. Media not being marked as played is not something I have actively witnessed.
@elan I’ll see one of my users playing a two-hour movie, and that two hours will show up in their total in the dashboard, but the playback doesn’t show up in Full History, even well after they’ve finished. Would them marking it as unplayed when done affect whether it shows up on my server-side play history? The server logs clearly show it being played.
I can submit the server logs in question if it’ll help, not publicly though as the user I’m using as an example just uses their email address as their username.
This also happens occasionally when my mom plays from her ipad remotely. It won’t show up in “now playing” but the transcoder process in task manager is running and I know she is watching a movie
I’ve been seeing this happen fairly regularly - two friends have access to my server, one streams from the PS4 client the other from the Xbox One client.
Everything they watch is reported live as “Now Playing” however when I check the logs later I notice some things I saw playing do not appear in the history. They are not experiencing any issues from their client(s) during playback.
