I used Plex DVR to record all of the NBC Olympic coverage from from OTA antenna - so far so good. I needed to optimize the recording to transcode for playback on our Roku TV, so I set up Plex to optimize the whole show, which worked fine from a file and playback standpoint. But while Plex claims to have optimized all of the episodes in the season, it appears that only one airing from each date has been optimized. I’m suspecting it could be an issue that’s either caused or reflected by how Plex is naming the optimized versions. It seems as though after MANY hours of transcoding I’m left with one optimized recording for each day, of the last broadcast. For example for this date:
which is of the last aired episode.
When the optimizing was happening, I could see all of the episodes in the conversion queue.
So it seems like Plex might be stomping on its own optimized files - has anyone seen this?
What compounds the problem is that Plex still “thinks” that it has optimized files for all the episodes and won’t let me manually queue up conversions of the un-optimized shows: “The media version already exists .” I could pull the files off my server and use Handbrake but I’d much prefer to use the built-in system.
Can you help me recreate a specific example of this?
If you have the time, or are willing to increase (temporarily) the number of log files your system retains, I will write this up and submit it immediately.
In Windows (IIRC) the registry contains your preferences. You’ll need add LogNumFiles=20 to retain 20 files.
In Linux/MacOS, the value is in Preferences.xml and the preference to add is LogNumFiles="20".
The default is all systems 5. Depending on how much you use (usually do), we may need more than 20. I’ve had them as high as 50.
What I’m trying to do is capture the event where the optimizer starts and , with Debug logging, creates the file. We can show input and output file names as well as capture (by directory listing) the resultant file.
This should be an easy correction for the team to make.
@ChuckPA OK, I will set this up ASAP and run it another test. I was able to replicate the issue so I think I can run a test when not much else is going on with Plex so there won’t be too much noise for you to pick through. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to set this up this eve and run it overnight - the optimizations take several hours on my server.
I’ve managed to reproduce easily. I’ve submitted the bug and chatted with the dev directly. All that remains now is for it to get on the schedule for them to fix. Given the nature of the failure and what he did to fix it for other optimizations, I hope <fingers crossed> this is equally as easy.
When I get to test something with the fix in, I’ll update you. There won’t be anything you can test until it hits Plex Pass but thanks for the offer! There’s a lot going on right now so I may not know when they’re planning until later this week. From the results of our chat, it was pretty obvious so all should be good.
