Plex keeps crashing during play/conversion, indefinite buffering

Plex Media Server
1

All was working, until yesterday. Here is what I did:

  1. Upgraded the Plex server from i5 6600K/RTX2060 Rev2 6G to i5 10400 with iGPU.
  2. Uninstalled nVidia drivers and software through add/remove software dialogs.
  3. Attempted to watch anything.

During play of tv show 1883, all seems OK. Inspecting the episode MKV file, VLC shows this: Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1). Video resolution: 1920x960.

During play of tv show War of the Worlds, the play begins. I can see the buffer progress bar being loaded up, everything is going. As the episode plays, the play progressbar slowly reaches up to the buffer progress bar. The buffer progress bar does get increased every few seconds, but not fast enough. Eventually the play progressbar reaches the buffer progressbar and plex player stops play and starts buffering. It keeps buffering indefinitely. CPU or iGPU activity is idle. Eventually, Plex Media Server.exe crashes. Inspecting the MKV for the episode tells me: Codec: MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hevc). Video resolution: 1920x804. I also tried to optimize the whole show, but that actually keeps crashing the PMS. Everytime it starts, it attempts to restart the transcoding queue, CPU utilization goes to 100%, the conversion speed is about 7x, and then after a while the PMS crashes.

I do see a lot of attempts to load CUDA libraries and failing to do that, but I read elsewhere on this forum that those log messages are OK and it’s just PMS trying to figure out what is available. I’m also quite confident in the HW, the temps are fine, it has 32G of RAM, the box should chew this just fine.

  1. Can anyone please confirm that I can actually give away my old HW (I want to give it to my friend, but I don’t want to tell them and then asking them to give it back) and PMS should actually work on Intel i5 10400? I’m looking to have 2-3 clients maximum, I do have some 4K shows that clients need to transcode to 1080p, but mostly it’s 1080p content being streamed to either Windows clients on Chrome, or Chromecast plugged into TV. Some files are x254 (1080p, 4K), some are x265 (1080p, 4K). I need to know if my current HW setup can actually support this. I thought it should work just fine, but now I’m not sure.

  2. What do?

Logs:
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-02-13_05-45-03.zip (1.2 MB)

2

Really? No help? Am I being dumb and missing something obvious? Or is the post too long to read?

3

Does the file you are transcoding happen to be converting AC3?

4

Yes, the audio stream is AC3 (for the affected show War of the Worlds). The other example, 1883, shows the audio stream is E-AC3, which works fine.

5

Also, I’ve given up on just having iGPU Plex server. I’ve put the RTX 2060 into it and now it streams just fine. I don’t understand why is the iGPU not enough to stream a simple 1080p file, but it is what it is.

EDIT 6/2022: I’ve discovered that the issue is caused by presence of nVidia driver. If the PC has nVidia driver installed but no dedicated nVidia GPU present, Plex will keep looking for compatible NVENC hardware and never find any. Uninstalling the driver solved the issue.

6

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