Plex is down after 6-12 minutes

General Discussions
1

I have Plex Media Server installed on my NAS (Synology DS716+ soft: DSM 6.0-732). I have clients on iOS devices:

  • Iphone
  • AppleTV last gen
    Both devices got latest Plex apps and newest firmware installed (issue are also encountering on older soft both server and client).
    After watching movies after 6-12 minutes movie stops (pause screen with movie meta data). I can continue play after pressing play button. Unfortunately after next few minutes Plex server does not respond. Next steps are: kill the process restart Plex server and continue watching on clients.

I must admit that it also happened to me on older Synology firmware 5.2. I also must admit that I’ve test few movies from my library and one of them works fine for about 30 minutes (I stopped test - but can continue it over night). The only difference I found between this movie and others is:
no crashes VS crashes
Codec AAC, Channels Stereo (93kbit) VS Codec AC3 Channels 5.1 (443 kbit)

I attached logs from client - and crash dump from server.

2

Unfortunately, that crash dump is just ~200k of nothing (all zeroes, technically), so it’s not useful here. To get better info, we’ll need logs from both the app and server side for the same period. Please:

  1. Make sure you have debug (but not verbose!) logging enabled on your server.
  2. Restart your Plex Media Server to get a fresh log.
  3. In the iOS app, start playback and wait for the playback to end unexpectedly.
  4. Gather your “Plex Media Server.log” file.
  5. Gather the iOS device logs again.
  6. Save the XML file for the library item you played.
  7. Attach the server log, iOS log zip, and XML file to a reply here.

If another crash dump (hopefully not the same “blank” thing) gets generated again, please attach that, too.

Also: Do the same files also have the same problem in other apps (Plex Web App, Roku, game console, etc.)?

3

here you have all the data. I attached also all the logs from server. Maybe you will find something interesting.

Additional info:
Besides crash of the server - during this play movie stops automatically and was resumed once. All the information should be logged.

Info about attachments:
PlexDebugInfo.zip - iOS logs
Logs Server - Media Server Logs

4

Sorry for the delay. We’ve been analyzing the logs and continue to do so. So far, it looks like Plex Media Server is working correctly and doing what it’s supposed to do as far as requests go. The iOS app is definitely occasionally stopping playback, but it’s not immediately obvious as to why the stop occurs (maybe a failure in the underlying player from Apple that we’re using). We’ll continue looking into the logs.

You didn’t answer the question about whether you see the same behavior in other apps.

It would also be interesting to know whether you see similar behavior in iOS if you instead use a file that can be direct played (rather than needing transcoding). For instance, a file meeting the following properties should generally direct play:

Container: MP4
Encoding: H.264 (e.g. “AVC”) “High” profile, “Level” 4.1 or less
Audio: Stereo (2.0) AAC

(You would, of course, also need to ensure that you selected a playback quality in the iOS app that was high enough to not force the file to be transcoded down.)

5

Hey,

Well. I am surprised. Plex Media Server is not working correctly after last stop . When logging to Synology NAS - I can see that PLEX is STOPPED on the APP list but the process is still ON. But when running PLEX again - SYNOLOGY is displaying an error site with connection issue. Killing process and running plex again helps. So its far from being up and running. I cannot access anything from plex server functions.

I was using client: Plex APP on APPLE TV and iPhone. Same issues on those configurations.
I was also building server on MAC BOOK PRO (2012) and same files were working fine (i’ve watched entire movie without even those stops encountered on client). So transcoding was working.

I can still try with this MP4 movie - but everything from observation point of view is telling me that the problem is with server on NAS machine. Again I bought NAS to meet technical expectations you mentioned on your site. Its powerful (for NAS) 4 cores X86 intel machine with 2GIGs of RAM. I was also checking how this NAS is sweating and it was laden in max 10%.