Plex Transcoder stops after ~180 seconds

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.19.5.3112
Player Version#: 4.41.1
I searched for a while trying to find an answer for this one and I’ve found mostly unanswered questions.

I just assembled a new server to take over Plex duties at my house. I’m running a Dell R710 with esxi 5.5, with Plex running on a Server19 VM. I installed Plex and configured it identically to my old Plex server running on a much older R410.

On this new server video files will play for a minute or two and then you can see in the player that buffering has stopped, the video stops playing and is unresumeable. At the same time, I observe the Plex Transcoder stopping in task manager in the server VM.

Transcoder is set to Automatic, with the temporary directory dumping to C:, Background transcoder set to Faster. It seems to do this with all video’s regardless of size.

Any ideas what could be happening here? I was running the latest Public version of Plex and switched over to the beta to see if maybe it was an update thing with no change in symptom. I dug into the logs a bit and found this:

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.217 [6956] DEBUG - [Now] Device is Chrome (Chrome).

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.217 [6956] DEBUG - [Now] Profile is Web

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.217 [6956] DEBUG - [Now] Updated play state for /library/metadata/4273.

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.217 [6956] DEBUG - Statistics: (zrxq7g4ll8jf8phvb7w0s6o8) Reporting active playback in state 0 of type 1 (scrobble: 0) for account 1

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.220 [7800] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Estimated bandwidth for z1lqzc97xufsuyk8gcfbc6xl to be 2844kbps over 10.01s

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.221 [6984] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.1.120:53536] 200 GET /:/timeline?ratingKey=4273&key=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F4273&playbackTime=69194&playQueueItemID=23&state=playing&hasMDE=1&context=library%3Acontent.library&time=5158000&duration=7309000 (8 live) TLS GZIP 5ms 875 bytes (pipelined: 8)

Aug 27, 2020 20:09:08.333 [1948] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Estimated bandwidth for z1lqzc97xufsuyk8gcfbc6xl to be 2844kbps over 10.00s

Aug 28, 2020 13:08:33.173 [0120] DEBUG - Shutting down idle session hwba394pjyo3igt8m5gt7hct (idle time is 180 seconds)

Aug 28, 2020 13:08:33.173 [0120] DEBUG - Killing job.

2

Are you transcoding in the root folder C:
I would create a folder C:\transcode or something similar for Plex to use for the temporary transcoder files.

And put that in the Plex settings…

image

3

Thanks for replying - what you suggested is one of the first things I tried when configuring the new server. No change in symptoms.

4

Try a trailing slash on the transcoder directory, c:\transcoder\.

5

Done, no change.

6

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