So, I think I have discovered my issue with the Plex DVR not working… Recap: Everything looked and worked fine until the program had completed its recording, once recorded it completely disappears from the schedule as if it were never there.
I did a lot of testing on the 3 Plex servers I run (2 Win, 1 QNAP NAS). I discovered that after a recording has completed, Plex attempts to move the recording to the designated “Library” (eg Movies, TV)… When this fails there is a brief few-second error message for the recording that the file move could not take place, then it disappears along with any trace of the recorded show.
My issue seems to have started in mid-March during some sort of QNAP NAS software upgrade wherein QNAP renamed some NAS directories… Not having these directory paths updated in Plex (Movies, Recorded TV amongst them), Plex just didn’t know what to do the with show. Why it is removed from the schedule is beyond me. Plex should leave the error message in the schedule (seems basic to me). After deleting existing library settings for Movies and Recorded TV, and adding in the correct (new) NAS directories, all seems to be working. I’ve been running the DVR on my 3 servers without issue.
In short, it wasn’t technically a Plex issue, but Plex definitely didn’t do anything to resolve the problem, and it didn’t make it easy for me to determine why recordings were failing.
I just fought with this problem for a few weeks. Started continually getting messages of “cannot record airing in the past.” The show would “record” but disappear when it finished and eventually disappear off the scheduled recordings for the day as if it was never scheduled. Very frustrating and difficult to know where to look to trace the problem. Using Plex on a Synology with an HDHomerun Prime. Tried ensuring everything was up-to-date (including Plex version 1.15.5.994), reapplying permissions to the NAS directories, restarted everything, uninstalled and reinstalled the DVR, nothing worked - occasionally short manual recordings would work (partial airings, maybe 2-5 minutes long), which just added to the puzzle.
Eventually, I tried one more thing: I restarted the Synology, stopped the Plex server/service on the Synology, downloaded the Plex server for Synology again (still version 1.15.5.994), and reinstalled it again using the manual install button (normal process for updating Plex on a Synology), started the server/service, and reapplied permissions to the share (Plex always resets them when it installs…). This worked! I tried some partial recordings and they worked. Then I allowed it to try to record some scheduled recordings (that had been failing) and those have all worked. Finally!
I’m sure if one can read and correlate 10,000 lines of log files it is possible to figure out where the problem is at and fix it. However, in this case, normal troubleshooting steps did not reveal what was going on. Reinstalling the server was a Hail Mary but nothing else had worked and I figured “why not?” My next step would have been to completely uninstall Plex and set it up from scratch but that would have been a lot of work.
Hopefully, I’m done with this problem. The DVR had been very reliable up to this point and hopefully, it will be again. I hope this helps someone resolve their problem with recording shows. Plex, we need better/clearer logging of recording events (like Tivo’s History menu) and a scheduled recording should never disappear from the calendar/agenda but should be listed with either the Play button or a button that shows clearly why it didn’t record.
Congrat @rqc! Sounds like you had a tougher time them I did. My Win7 Media Center (which is still my main DVR) has been flawless for years and it has great easy to find recording logs too. Seems to be something that Plex seriously need to improve in PMS.
Ugh, I spoke too soon! Now it’s not recording anything. Now I’m getting “could not move recorded media to destination” which is almost certainly a permissions error, which is weird because obvious has changed. Did a chown -R plex:users “TV Shows” (my TV directory) and restarted the Plex Media Server. Seems to have worked. I have two successful recordings in the TV folder and a movie recording in process. Wonder how people who don’t know how to use a command line ever figure out this wonky stuff…
I am back to " cannot record airing in the past" - nothing records unless I manually select a program in the current time slot. I may be at the point of uninstalling Plex from the Synology and trying to set it up again. Frustrating. It has worked fine for over a year.
Oddly enough, I also cannot record Jeopardy on plex and my hdhomerun. It records 2-6 minutes, usually only final jeopardy…tried a different plex server–same result. HDHomerun works fine on the same channel for live tv
