I have a Hauppauge! WinTV-quadHD PCI-E tuner card in my Plex server, running on a Ryzen 7 1700 with 16GB of DDR4. The OS is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Plex version 1.11.3.4803. The shows are over-the-air antenna.
The DVR feature has never worked. I have shows scheduled to be recorded and when they come on, Plex says they’re being recorded, but then nothing happens. I don’t see them show up anywhere after that.
Another issue I have is that Live TV looks no-where near as good as it does with the same cable plugged into a TV. And it can’t be because my TV has better video processing than a Ryzen 7, is it? Are there some switches I can flip to make the image quality of live/recorded TV closer to that of Antenna straight to my TV?
I know someone is going to ask me to send logs, so please let me know exactly what logs to get and how to get them.
I figured this out, for anyone having similar issues here’s how I did it:
- Download logs. Under Server Settings, go to Help, Download Logs.
- Open the logs using Sublime Text (google it). It makes the logs easier to read and search through.
- Open the “Plex Media Server.log” files, those contain the DVR logs.
- Search the logs (ctl+F) for “DVR:Grabber” that’s the log indicator for when the DVR is about to record something.
- Read any errors surrounding those logs.
In my case the error was “ERROR - DVR:Grabber: No write permission.”
It turns out, when installing Plex on Linux, Plex creates a new user with the username “plex” and the user group “plex”. This account needs level 7 access to the folder, that’s read, write, and execute permissions. So while your user account may have full access, that doesn’t mean the plex user account does.
To fix this, do:
sudo chown -R :plex foldername/
chmod -R 774 foldername/
What 774 does is give the owner, you, rwx access, the group plex rwx access, and anyone else r access (read only).
If you don’t care about security, you could just do chmod -R 777 foldername/ and be done with it.
