Plex seems to malfunction and nothing records

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I have a problem with my Plex DVR setup. It will be fine for a few days, but then suddenly the recordings stop. Things I have noticed when this happens:

  • If I let it sit long enough in this problem state, guide data will completely empty. Doesn’t refresh.
  • Opening Activities > Now Playing shows content stuck from the last time someone played something. Each person’s activity is showing as currently streaming, even though nothing is playing on any of their devices. I’ll sometimes have 8 items or more showing as “Now Playing”.
  • Plex DVR recordings stop. If there were items in the recording queue when the problem occurred, they stay in the .grab folder. Nothing new is recorded.
  • The recording schedule shows shows that it recorded in the past, but blank for shows that were unable to record. For example I have shows that recorded up to 8PM on 1/12, but no scheduled shows were recorded on 1/13, 1/14, 1/15, 1/16, and 1/17. Those days in the recording schedule are blank, even though plenty of recordings should have happened. The schedule resumes for today when I restarted the Plex Media Server.

Restarting the Plex Media server seems to clean up the .grab folder, to trigger the downloading of the program guide again, clear the “Now Playing” section, and start recordings again. I have to restart the Plex Media Server about weekly. Unfortunately, I usually notice the problem too late, after missing show recordings.

I’d love for someone to take a look at my config or logs if it would help to figure out what is going wrong.

2

Here are the Plex Media Server logs. I believe the problem occurred 1/12/2017 somewhere in the 7:30 to 8:00 timeframe, as that was the last show recorded.

3

I noticed similar behavior when I checked my DVR Plex instance tonight; nothing had been recorded for a couple of days, so I checked the settings. Plex couldn’t auto-find the Tuner (in “Server | DVR (Beta)”), and when I entered the IP addr manually, I just got the “please-wait” pinwheel. The page never updated after that; I had to manually reload the web page to investigate further.

Unable to get PMS to talk to the Extend, I restarted the service, and it happily found the tuner again automatically. (NB: When I tried to restart the DVR PMS instance using “service plexmediaserver-dvr restart”, it failed to start after stopping; I had to issue a “service plex… start”, too, to get it running again.)

My server has two PMS instances (one regular, and one DVR beta-4 instance) running in separate jails on FreeNAS-9.10.2 (Atom 8-core 2.40GHz, 32 GB memory); the NAS and 'Extend tuner are plugged into the same Gigabit switch.

Plex logs attached.

Last recorded item appears to be on 17.Jan, as shown in log snippet from the Extend:

20170117-01:30:01 Tuner: tuner0 streaming http to 192.168.1.204:28132
20170117-02:00:01 Tuner: tuner1 tuning 11.2 BYUtv (8vsb:653MHz-2)
20170117-02:00:01 Tuner: tuner1 streaming http to 192.168.1.204:51583
20170117-06:35:00 Tuner: tuner0 tuning 13.1 KSTU-HD (8vsb:557MHz-3)
20170117-06:35:00 Tuner: tuner0 streaming http to 192.168.1.204:17485
20170117-07:05:00 Tuner: tuner1 tuning 13.1 KSTU-HD (8vsb:557MHz-3)
20170117-07:05:00 Tuner: tuner1 streaming http to 192.168.1.204:36296
20170120-04:58:07 Tuner: tuner0 tuning 2.1 KUTV-HD (8vsb:593MHz-1)
20170120-04:58:07 Tuner: tuner0 streaming http to 192.168.1.8:37172
20170120-04:58:41 Tuner: tuner0 tuning 2.1 KUTV-HD (8vsb:593MHz-1)
20170120-04:58:42 Tuner: tuner0 streaming http to 192.168.1.8:37176

Notes:

  • 192.168.1.204 is Plex DVR instance; stopped recording on 17.Jan with program at 7:05 am (bolded)
  • 192.168.1.8 is HDRun Android app used tonight to verify tuner working
4

Yesterday the entire Plex Media Server application crashed. I had to restart everything. Kids told me right away because they were trying to watch and it was timing out.

5

One thing to note–Plex isn’t the only thing that accesses the HDHomeRun Prime tuners. I also have 2 Apple TVs that have the Channels app. I understand that sometimes a tuner might not be available when it wants to record. I don’t know if that is causing the system to malfunction, though.

6

Logs for the most recent crash. Occurred 1/19/2017, and I believe it happened some time in the afternoon after the kids got home from school (3:00P or later). I checked the Windows event viewer, but there were no crashes reported. The Plex Media Server just seems to have quit.

This is not the same behavior as reported above, which is the PMS keeps running but functions abnormally. But since there seems to have been a crash I thought I’d report it.

7

I suspect I’m seeing same thing but I’ve not collected logs as I can’t identify why it happens.
Running latest (redux) DVR release on Unraid in Linux.io Docker.

8

Logs: Go to Settings > Server > Help > Download Logs

9

is it possible to get newer set of logs with it not recording something it should.

10

I have a cron job installed to restart the service every night at 1:30 am to keep mine stable. I’ll disable the job and see if I can catch it misbehaving in the next day or three.

11

The logs I put in the initial post missed 5 days of shows. Did those show up in the logs? I’ve restarted the Plex media server once since then after it just stopped, but it hasn’t stopped working yet. When it does I will grab a new set of logs.

Are there any different logs we should be looking for, specific to the DVR?

12

And the system went goofy again.

I had disabled my “service restart” cron job, and have been checking the server periodically, but it appears I didn’t watch closely enough, so the recordings stopped three days ago. Logs attached. The last things successfully recorded (and transferred out of the .grab subdir) have file time-stamps of “Feb 3 21:15” (movie) and “Feb 3 21:30” (show).

Grepping for “tuner” I find

$ cat * | grep -i tuner | sort -n
Feb 03, 2017 21:15:02.178 [0x80e84fc00] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Freed a tuner (now 1 available)
Feb 03, 2017 21:30:02.332 [0x80b851c00] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Freed a tuner (now 2 available)
Feb 03, 2017 23:35:00.855 [0x80e84e800] DEBUG - HDHomerun Grabber: Starting a media grab on device device://tv.plex.grabbers.hdhomerun/1054CF94 tuner 0.
Feb 03, 2017 23:35:00.867 [0x80d081400] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Allocated a tuner (1 left)
Feb 03, 2017 23:35:00.867 [0x80d081400] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Waiting for a tuner (2 available).
Feb 04, 2017 00:05:00.707 [0x80d84fc00] DEBUG - HDHomerun Grabber: Starting a media grab on device device://tv.plex.grabbers.hdhomerun/1054CF94 tuner 0.
Feb 04, 2017 00:05:00.720 [0x80d080c00] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Allocated a tuner (0 left)
Feb 04, 2017 00:05:00.720 [0x80d080c00] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Waiting for a tuner (1 available).
Feb 04, 2017 00:05:01.190 [0x80d081400] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Freed a tuner (now 1 available)
Feb 04, 2017 00:35:01.344 [0x80d080c00] DEBUG - MediaGrabber: Freed a tuner (now 2 available)

… and no further mentions of tuner activity. It looks like it was trying to get another few shows but no evidence of files in the system – including in the .grab subdir.

The “Recording Schedule” also shows a gap: no “recording blocks” (calendar view) for 04.Feb or 05.Feb and blocks for 06.Feb only after a service restart. The last blocks shown before the gap are the last files that are indeed on disk.

When the system first came up, there were a bunch of “blocks” for shows on 05 & 06.Feb that had the Warning icon, saying the system is unable to record in the past (that would have been a feat! ), but those have been cleaned up now that the system has had a chance to do a little maintenance and sanity checking of the database.

Attached is the log dumps from about an hour after the restart, so it’ll include any logging associated with clean-up. The logs should cover back to a time before the system experience whatever is plaguing it. (I downloaded logs right before the restart as well, if they’re needed.)

13

Thanks for disabling your cron job to try to catch this problem. Sorry you missed some recordings. :frowning: I’ve been watching my server closely and it hasn’t misbehaved yet.

Regards,
Geoff Faulkner

14

Malfunction again. I was using Plex tonight and looking at the recording schedule. I got an error that said to go to the forums for help, as it couldn’t display the schedule. Recordings showed up down the right panel, and I tried to cancel a particular show that I didn’t want to record any longer. Got an error trying to delete.

After I got suspicious that the server wasn’t working I discovered shows that were supposed to record most of the day didn’t record, including Supergirl that was supposed to start at 7:58.

I stopped the server and tried to restart it, but the icon wouldn’t show. I had to restart the entire server to get the Plex Media Server started again. I checked the .grab folder, and 4 shows started recording.

Thanks for any help you can offer. I’d love to help make this a more stable product!.

Geoff

15

I just updated to the latest Plex release (Plex Media Server 1.4.2.3400). I noticed a few bug fixes that could have been impacting my setup, so I’m hopeful the beta will be stable! Crossing my fingers!

Specifically, I have a library called Plex Recorded TV that all my Plex DVR shows get saved into. I have a Windows scheduled task that launches a VBScript to parse these folders, look for any recordings that are finished (not locked for writing), do a Handbrake conversion of the .TS file to .MP4 and output to a different folder on my NAS. That folder is indexed by a separate library called “TV Shows”. I then allow Plex library update learn about the missing/new media files.

One issue I see with my setup is that Plex keeps recording duplicate episodes of the shows. I’ll get a SD and HD version recorded and then have to figure out which I want to keep/convert.

16

I had this problem until i disabled unattended upgrades on my ubuntu box.

17

After upgrading to the latest version the indicator behavior seems to have changed. I no longer get a weird crash when trying to edit the recording schedule. However, when I looked at the server today there were about 10 shows that were supposed to record yesterday and today that did not record. The .grab folder had many folders inside, each with a 0-byte video .TS file inside.

I restarted the server and it cleaned up those grab folders/files. Immediately after restarting it is recording a show (Grey’s Anatomy (2005) - S03E25 - Didn’t We Almost Have It All at 1:00 PM), and the file has size (currently 116MB).

Attached are the logs for my system.

Geoff

18

Malfunctioned again. This is way more often than before I did the upgrade. It is currently not functioning and there are recordings stuck in my .grab folder. Is there anything I can test or show you? I am seriously concerned in the stability of the DVR product right now.

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19

One interesting thing…Plex is continuing to record new things. I went into the Program Guide and told it to record a random show. That show recorded. So I got to wondering if it had anything to do with my setup. I have 2 HD HomeRun Prime tuners setup and thought maybe one of the tuners isn’t sending any data.

I unchecked all the channels on my second tuner, and recorded a show with the first tuner. Everything ok. Records.

I unchecked all the channels on my first tuner, and tried to re-checked all the channels on the second tuner. Plex gave an error that there is a “duplicate channel mapping”. As I scrolled through the list I found several channels that had no mapping at all. I also found channels that were mapped to incorrect channels. I went through the list meticulously, and re-mapped all the channels.

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After correcting the channel mapping issue I could record a show on the second tuner successfully. I don’t know if this was causing failed recordings, but it is the first error that I could find in my system/setup.

Attached a new set of logs as I modified the channel config and eliminated the duplicated channel mapping issue.

20

More skipped recordings again. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying so hard to make this beta work but I am really getting frustrated. I was hoping that someone from support would chime in, but after submitting logs for over a month I don’t believe anyone has any suggestions that will help.

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