I’ve been using Plex for years on my Mac Mini. It’s not a new installation or anything like that. The media lives on a NAS, but all the metadata is in the default place. Last week Plex started crashing whenever I tried to play a video file. The app loads fine and I can tweak settings, &c. but can’t play media. I’ve tried:
Quitting Plex and restarting
Rebooting the Mac Mini
Rebooting the Apple TV
Playing video via the Plex web app
Rebooting the NAS
Reinstalling Plex from a fresh download (just replacing the app, not a completely fresh installation)
Trying to play different video files
When I quit Plex or reinstall it, it seems to work at first - I can start to play a movie. But then if I pause it and play something else, it crashes. Then when I start it again and try to play something, it crashes.
Other information:
Have you checked the Plex knowledge base and searched on the sub and Google: yes.
Server version: 1.9.5.4339.
OS: Mac OS Yosemite 10.10.6 (Mac Mini 2011).
Clients, w/ versions, if applicable: Apple TV 4, Web.
What you did? I tried to play a movie.
What happened? Plex Media Server crashed.
What you expected? I expected the movie to play. It’s been working for years and this problem just started last week.
What are your (relevant) settings? I have no idea what’s relevant here, but I’m confident that I probably messed something up, and that somebody here can identify it.
Link to logs (optional but recommended): Following the directions here, I turned on logging, replicated the crash and went to look for my logs, but there was no Logs folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server. The only folders are: Plug-in Support, Plug-ins, Crash Reports, Codecs, Updates, Metadata, Media, Scanners, Thumbnails, Site Configurations. There’s also a file, update-log.txt. Would downloading the logs from Plex > Settings > Help be useful?
Please ensure debug logging enabled
restart the server
After the next crash, restart and use the web interface to download the logs and you can then attach the zip here
We can then look for any uploaded crash reports after the crash - the logs will give information to identify the crash reports
You could also look here for any Mac OS collected crash reports
This crash was already being investigated and a fix is being worked on
Wait a second, what exactly does that mean?
This is caused by a bug in Plex Media Server and not by anything I did? What are the details of the bug, and where can I read more about it? Does it only affect Plex for Mac OS, or is the bug in all platforms’ versions? Is only the latest version of Plex affected? Why has Plex not communicated about this on its very active twitter account? Where are the instructions for me to downgrade to a version of Plex that doesn’t have the bug? When will the bug be fixed? How will I be notified that it is fixed?
I have no information at this point on what version of plex media server will have the fix
No information at all? So what are the chances that I’m going to be waiting … [days / weeks / months / years] … for this to be fixed? Is it a high priority issue? Is it being worked on actively or is it, you know, being “worked on”?
If somebody had shared this information from the Plex twitter account last Monday at 9 am, then there would have been an entire business week between then and now. But instead, I spent that week doing all kinds of crazy things to try to find out how I was causing the problem that you guys apparently already knew about, but had chosen not to announce.
Not sure if this is the same issue but it just happened to me on Windows Server 2012 R2. I can play things sometimes but I just played a movie on my phone and the server went down a second later. It’s happened a few other times this week.
@Tenzinn said:
Not sure if this is the same issue but it just happened to me on Windows Server 2012 R2. I can play things sometimes but I just played a movie on my phone and the server went down a second later. It’s happened a few other times this week.
I cannot see any crash reports for any of your servers tied to your plex.tv account
@sa2000 said:
I will try and find out more information
@gesher A fix is being produced for this crash. It is expected to be included in release 1.9.7 of Plex Media Server
I am looking into providing a pre-release build for any Mac users with this crash that would be happy to try it.
Anyone with this crash - Please send me a Private Message and i will make that available once the pre-release build is ready and i can confirm the crash on the server. All logs seen for this crash have this line as the last line logged DEBUG - Codecs: testing h264_videotoolbox (encoder)
The crash has been seen from users on Mac OS and feedback from a user that it happens when hardware transcoding is enabled.
I know this topic was posted two years ago, but I’m experiencing a similar issue on a Windows machine. My Plex server runs on a Windows PC, and my files are stored on a local NAS. I’ve been running Plex like this for over two years without issues. I’m currently running PMS 4.8.4 and, based on the logs I have, it looks like a drv_file.ini file is missing? I’ll attach the logs
Unfortunately that didn’t work, but thank you for the advice. I didn’t realize this was a mac forum, as I sort of just stumbled my way here after an hour of google searches.
