So I got my Plex DVR working after permissions somehow were changed, and it’s been working fine for a few days - It recorded everything I had scheduled, until last night. That failed with ‘There was not enough free disk space to start the recording’. I don’t know how Plex is determining how much free space is needed to allow a recording, but while the volume that is being recorded to is down to 9% free, that’s still just shy of 800GB. If 800GB is not enough space to record a TV show… And to make it odder, I tested trying to record something that was on at the time today, and that stated recording fine.
Unfortunately, the logs as downloaded from the web ui don’t seem to go back to last night, so I don’t know what it was complaining about or why other than the ‘There was not enough free disk space to start the recording’ listed in the web UI under ‘airing details’ for the show.
Does anyone know how it determines if there’s enough free space? Is this something that can be seen and changed? I poked around the web UI and didn’t see anything that seemed relevant. I don’t know if it didn’t like the 9% free (If that’s the case, why did this other show start recording?), or if maybe 8% is the threshold and it hit that threshold while recording and cancelled the recording.
So this is getting rather infuriating - I had set a program to record for my wife yesterday, and it failed to record citing ‘insufficient space’, which is insane because not only was there plenty when I first started this thread, since then I found and removed quite a bit of old stale files and now have 846GB free - and on top of that, another program scheduled to record right after that recorded just fine.
Any ideas why Plex seems to think that 846GB isn’t enough space to record?
After grabbing the file (.grab in the target directory),
it will use the transcoder temp while it prepares to write the final output (contiguous) file in the destination directory.
Sometimes permission errors are reported as insufficient space. Have you checked that?
The transcoder temp directory is pointed to ‘/mnt/ramdisk’. This is 11GB in size.
Last week I had another instance of a recording failing due to ‘insufficient space’, and at the time, I happened to have Plex up in a browser and saw the notification - less than a minute after the ‘failure’, I manually started the show that failed recording without issue. When nothing is transcoding, it’s empty, and even when something’s transcoding, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it fill up. That also wouldn’t really explain why the scheduled recording failed but a minute later I was able to get it to start recording with nothing really changing…
As Chuck mentioned the transcoder temp directory is where the segment files get assembled into a single file. Anything over 1.5 hours or 2 hour long shows finishing up at the same time would exceed the 11GB you have designated. You can test this by pointing the transcoder directory to the same path as your TV directory.
I decided to look in on a couple of concurrent recordings going on. There seems to be a change in behavior for the recordings. The segments are being written to the transcoder temp directory and the assembled files are concurrently being written to .grab. 1/2 hour in I’m at 10 GB.
