I am still experiencing periodic (but often) failures to record from my HD Homerun box. Is there any issue with recording to a NAS drive into a folder while someone is watching a program previously recorded within the same folder? In other words, I record to a folder called TV Shows on my NAS drive, but it seems that while someone is watching a show from that folder, my recordings fail. Does this make any sense?
Is your Plex Server running on your NAS or is it on a separate computer and just saving recordings to the NAS?
My PMS is running on a separate Windows 10 computer. I just save recordings to the NAS
My recommendation then would be to record to your local machine initially. Then have a script that runs at some interval that moves the recordings from your Windows 10 computer to the NAS. I do something similar except I record to a SSD in my Plex Server Windows 10 machine. After recording I use a script that moves the recording from the SSD to a HDD in the same computer. Script runs every 5 minutes on my computer. One line in the script to do the move:
robocopy /MOVE /S “G:\TV_DVR” “F:\Recorded TV” /XD “G:\TV_DVR.grab”
Moves the files from “G:\TV_DVR” to “F:\Recorded TV” excluding the grab folder for new recordings: /XD “G:\TV_DVR.grab”
You can setup multiple folders for your Library:
So you could have one pointing to a folder on your Windows 10 computer and one pointing to your existing NAS folder for recordings.
When setting up recordings with multiple folders in the library you get a dropdown to select which folder to record to:
If you choose to go this route I would recommend deleting the current recordings and set them back up with the new folder recording location. Plex seems to want to hang onto the old recording location sometimes.
Recordings can sometimes be a little finicky. If the hard drive is not ready to save data for a recording when Plex is requesting the recording could fail. I know another user was trying to use an external hard drive for recordings. The external drive was spinning down when not in use. When Plex started a recording they were seeing errors we believed while the drive was trying to spin back up, drive wasn’t ready so Plex aborted the recording.
Very interesting! Yes, the NAS drive will sit idle a lot until someone wants to watch something. The HDD on the PC wouldn’t have that problem. I’m supposing recordings being transcoded stay in the .grab folder until they are fully complete, so the time between transfers doesn’t matter??
Yes the recording will stay in the grab folder until it is complete. I run post processing with mcebuddy which is why I have the script run every 5 minutes. Depending on length of show and whether SD or HD causes my post processing to run anywhere from 3-15 minutes. Time wouldn’t matter really, you could run it every 30 minutes if you wanted.
Thanks… I have put the task into the scheduler and it seems to work. We’ll see if it fixes the periodic problem.
Thanks for the idea. I had actually hoped this was how Plex would do it by default. I didn’t realize it created the grab folders inside the recordings folders. In my case all the recording folders are on a NAS, lately I’ve been getting random but frequent failed recordings.
My plex server is running ubuntu with a smallish SSD (big enough i’m sure to hold a few recordings before their moved). I’m not terribly versed in linux directory structures, could anyone recommend the “right” place to put a recordings folder? Plex is also it’s own user I believe, so should the folder owner be plex:plex? I’ve used crontab before so I think I can handle scheduling the copy command.
As I have it setup now, watching a recording live is an unnecessary amount of network traffic. HDhomerun -> Plex server -> write to NAS then read from NAS -> Plex server -> TV. That single stream is passing through the network interface 4 times simultaneously on the server. That doesn’t even include if someone else in the house is watching something. Not really ideal if a little extra latency on a recording start causes it to fail.
Edit: Looks like the ubuntu plex server likes recordings in /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/ (or at least that’s where I ended up putting it. Here’s the command I ended up putting in the root crontab to move the files:
cp -a /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/SSDrecordings/* /media/NAS/PlexDVR && rm -rf /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/SSDrecordings/*
I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution, but this worked for me.
John, this has been awesome! This absolutely fixed the problems and I haven’t had a single recording fail since. I recorded 34 sessions of the Olympics and several other shows since (singles and two at once) and have not failed a single time. Thanks so much for the suggestion. Very much appreciated!!
Glad it worked for you. Recording locally instead of on network or external HD storage is probably always a better choice. Then move the recordings to where you ultimately want them to reside.
