So my server is comprised of an Nvidia Shield and external 8TB NAS. I’ve noticed recently that my recordings keep failing saying there isn’t enough space to start recording. I checked and my NAS is at 94%, which means despite me needing to upgrade soon, there should be enough space to record. I started thinking maybe the server is trying to record directly onto the SHIELD, but after some initial confusion regarding where that setting is, I checked and it’s pointed exactly where it should be. I’ve deleted my DVR and made a new one in hopes that fixes things. Not sure what the issue is, and some help regarding this would be very appreciated. Server version is latest public SHIELD build, updated it this morning (and the problem happened beforehand as well, at least last week).
That’s my first thought. It makes sense that it would cache locally, as I know there’s some degree of processing that happens… especially with the feature of being able to watch a recording in progress.
All right, deleted any app I didn’t need. (I basically only use it as a server nowadays anyway.) Hopefully that helps. I’ll check back in after attempting to record something.
Plex documentation says 32 GB of local storage min for server space (for DVR). If you have a 16 GB shield, you basically need to add internal (adopted) storage to make any kind of DVR recording. With absolutely nothing else installed and no plex library to speak of ive found that you can get away with recording about 45 min to 1.5 hours or so before running out of room. If you have the 500 GB version…something is weird.
I have the 16GB SHIELD. It’s weird that they changed it to be like this, before the issue arose I was able to record TV just fine without external storage for nearly a year.
I’ll get a hard drive to add to it, I’d add flash storage but those have limited read/write cycles and I’ve already killed one 128gb drive using this method.
Recomended a quality SSD. I have a Samsung T5 500 GB set up as adopted storage and it works great. The server is pretty stable for me and recordings are reliable. Several Plex specifics are still buggy such as timeshifting live TV and HW transcoding…but basic DVR works well for me…including 4 hour recordings etc.
I had the same issue after the update. You will need to go into PMS in a web browser and go to settings and then transcode. For me my transcode directory was blank. I created a new folder on my external USB drive that i use on my shield to store all my media and pointed the transcode to that folder. I recommend that you put this at the root level of where your libraries are on your storage so you can edit a library and get the correct file path and just change to the new folder you created.
Once you do this you do not even need to restart PMS just go to guide and click record and wait and it will work.
This is dumb that they broke this setting as the transcode was already happening on the external media when i initially set my Shield up as PMS and moved it to my external storage. Now if they will just fix it so i can actually record a movie that is being shown by a TV station as that was also broke in the last update.
Would it be okay to use a folder on my NAS for this? Does the transcode directory use up a ton of space? Is it essentially just using the space as RAM?
The transcode directory is a temporary location where the recorded show is held while it is processed. Once the show finishes recording the file will show up in the proper library and the items in the transcode folder will be removed. I am sure you could put this on your NAS but i would suggest keeping it on the local plex server for performance purposes.
If your Shield is from 2015 then you will have a micro SD slot that you could use to get up to a 128gb sdmc card in and adopt that as internal storage. If you have a newer Shield that does not have the micro SD slot then you will need to use a USB flash drive and adopt it as internal storage and then you would not need the transcode directory on the NAS.
I have one of the newer SHIELDs without a SD card slot, I’m planning on attaching a small hard drive (hard drives don’t wear out as easily as flash memory, I’ve used flash memory to expand storage once and I burned through all its read/write cycles).
