Overnight, Rasplex is reporting "Unknown Video Codec:" for AVC movies

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1

A very perplexing problem:

My wife and I were watching a BluRay rip of “First Man” Saturday night (made with MakeMKV). About two thirds of the way through, we stopped it and turned off the TV for the night (we never turn off the RPi). The next day, we went back to watch the rest, but upon hitting PLAY, we got a message:
"
Transcoding
Unknown Video Codec:
"
(Note that there is no codec name after the colon)

I tried other movies, and most of them gave the same error. The ones that played correctly were MPEG2. The AVC files would not play.

Nothing had changed between in the system between Saturday and Sunday, so I wasn’t sure where to start. One by one, I powered everything down and restarted them (RasPlex, Synology NAS, network switch, in that order). Same problem.

To verify whether it was the file or the player, I tried the movies on the iPad, and everything played correctly. I then tried my new RPi-3B+ (with the patched RasPlex for the B+) on another TV, and it had the exact same problem. I then installed Kodi + Plex-for-Kodi, and it worked correctly (although my wife HATES it). I then downloaded the latest RasPlex (although I already had the latest), burned it onto a fresh SD card, and tried it, and it fails as well.

It’s not the files.
It’s not the RPi’s.
It has to be RasPlex. But why? After three years, it suddenly doesn’t know what an AVC file is?

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Mark

2

I don’t know why it broke, but I now know how to fix it (if it happens again).

First, a correction:
It was not just the AVC files that “lost” their codecs. By the next day, ALL “Movies”, “TV Shows” and “Other Videos” also would not play. Where RasPlex would normally show the type of file (like “1080p AAC”) in the lower-left corner for each video, it would be blank on non-working videos.

RasPlex must be doing something different than the other Plex clients - probably something that has since been deprecated. I suspect that the Plex server (Synology NAS) somehow lost all of the codec information from the database, but that all of the more recent clients didn’t seem to need it (I tried iPad, Android and the web-client and they all worked).

I fixed it by selecting “Analyze” from the menus for “Movies”, “TV Shows” and “Other Videos” in the web-client. I then restarted RasPlex, and all of the codec information was back on the screen.