Had PMS running on my Shield for years with no issue, but after some recent updates i regularly have issues with playing back media on my various devices at home as the PMS/Shield says it has run out of space. Yes i have the 16gb version but i’ve added a 128 USB stick to it and added it as adoptable storage and also added a 128 SD card and gone through the procedure within the PMS app to move my contents over to the SD. However the SD shows as only have a small amount of space. I have also redirect Plex to use the SD as the temp transcoding directory and noticed a transcode folder has been created on it which indicates to me it has worked. However, when trying to watch (mainly 4K) content on my devices it errors out with the log saying there isn’t enough space. I would have though the extra space i’ve added would have made plenty available. I have removed and disabled almost all other apps in the Shield as I purely use it for PMS. I’ve found that if i reboot the PMS it will normally work fine for a day or two before complaining again. Any ideas?
I’m in exactly the same boat! Seems to have only started on recent updates. I have reset my Shield twice in the last two days and issue occurs again after a day as I assume generate jobs run in the background that use all the internal space even tho I have a 128GB SSD as adopted storage and another external 500 GB drive with the plex server storage set to.
Thanks
Chris
i’ve had a similar problem that as you in the last months. I can’t move my PMS to external usb drive. It’s been there since i’ve had a Shield TV. It just hangs for hours and eventually fails.
Today i did a full factory reset. without installing anything I updated plex and created a new pms in the setup and tried to transfer my pms to my external usb drive. It does the same thing. It’s only 300mb. if you’re not sure what i mean this is the process i’m using https://support.plex.tv/articles/moving-server-data-storage-location-on-nvidia-shield/ and when i get to step 6 the “spinner” either lasts forever or fails after a few hours. i’ve let it run overnight and it only fails And this is with a factory reset.
I even tried to uninstall all updates to the server and plex app. Nothing works. I think someone doing updates in the recent times broke Plex on the Shield. And worse it’s when i did have it installed it was taking all my space on my internal drive.
A side note, i had it installed on my attached USB thumbdrive for years. The problems started a few months ago. Everything was fine. Something happened to my server and it got renamed as “local host” and placed on my internal drive. That’s when i noticed the running out of space warnings. The external server install no longer worked. That was like two months ago. It’s been problems ever since.
I’m the same and had it running on an externally attached SSD for ages. Like you I have only noticed the problem of space recently. I found even if I follow the article above and move an empty PMS configuration to an external drive then stop and start the server via the setting screen that it won’t restart.
Update
Found a re-boot and waiting a little and the server came up. Was able to restore a copy of my old library and it’s working. I have disable all the jobs so let’s see how things look tomorrow.
Plex has been filling internal storage on my shield lately too despite being set to use external storage. I’ve had to wipe data twice now.
Plex, please fix this!!!
mine has a mind of it’s own. Again, it created a second server on it’s own. Keep in mind, i factory reset the shield. updated plex and plex server and created a pms server. Then couldn’t move the empty server to external. overnight it created a new server entry so now there are two pms server entries in the plex app but one is broken. im pretty over plex. it looks pretty but VLC simply works 1000 times better at playing the actual file. And is way less of a hassle. And amazingly plex is 90% why i bought the device.
This seems potentially related.
Disabling the background generation jobs and space is good now. @BinaryJay I think you are right and it’s something to do around the Intro Video Process. I also found on my secondary plex server running in a docker container that the Intro Video Process was hanging and using a large amount of memory on the VM it runs in.
I disabled intro detection last night (and deleted my whole TV library) and plan on watching the space over the next few days… if it seems to do the trick, I’ll wipe … again… and start over with it disabled. Deleting the TV library did not clear whatever space is getting hogged and you can’t access the storage location where it is building up on shield without rooting it which I don’t want to do… so the only way to reclaim the space is to wipe the whole server data. My poor library has been wiped so many times over the last while…
I was thinking of ‘rooting’ my device also but also would rather not! Found the same thing with a factory reset was the only way to get the space back. I think I have reset mine a total of 6 times in a couple of days! Luckily I was able to restore my library and all the metadata etc. Think I will keep everything disabled at the moment!
Same here, anyone know how to clean this tmp folder without clear all the data and rebuild the library ?
You can only access the storage location where files are building up if you root the shield, it’s normally not accessible without root.
I wiped and rebuilt last night with intro detection off. Will report back soon if that ends up being effective to work around this until they fix it.
Anybody know how to set the temporary transcode folder path to ensure it goes on removable storage? I set to the path solid explorer showed in a folder I made on the drive but no files ever appear there during transcode.
So this is my solution
I save my entire usb plex library on my computer.
Reset the plex app on the shield (clear data) ang get back the 8gb /tmp data.
Recreate a new plex server and move it to the usb stick.
Remove my usb drive and recopy all the backup files from computer to it.
Then i have my old library available again.
Do not forget to deactivate the video intro markers that create the bug !
@baz33 I did something similar! Only choice we have at the moment unfortunately.
Would be great to have a Plex Dev comment on this issue?
Can you provide more detailed instructions on how you did this? Exactly which folders you copied, where you moved them to, etc?
Would be much appreciated by those of us having this issue!
First you need to have your library copy on a USB drive/stick SDCard etc… (and use the move library option of plex server)
- Remove the stick properly from the shield
- Then you copy the directory #YOUR_USB_DRIVE#/Android/data/com.plexapp.mediaserver.smb/Plex Media Server/ on your computer (it can be very long on my side i had 500.000 files) on any temporary folder (ssd drive is prefered)
- Then you remove the plex server app or reset the data from the Applications Parameters (it’s a system app) on your shield.
- Reconnect your usb drive to the shield
- Relaunch plex, it will ask you to recreate a new server, say ok and skip all structure creation
- Go to the parameter and move the new plex server to the usb stick, it will remove your plex folder on it
- After that disconnect your stick and recopy all previous files from your save folder to the usb
- Reconnect the stick and relaunch the server (or reboot your shield)
- It’s done
I don’t try it but maybe with two usb drive you can skip the copy of all files to the usb drive.
- After remove the drive and clear the plex server app
- Move the new plex server library to a temporary usb drive (to create the config that point to usb)
- After moving the empty library, you can disconnect the temporary usb drive and connect the previous one.
- Restart plex server, it should work
It has been a number of days now since I rebuilt my library with the scan intros feature turned off (both in the global library settings, and the TV library itself) and PMS still seems to be behaving with internal storage so it seems that this feature can be confirmed as the problem.
Honestly new features like this should be added as disabled by default making them an opt-in by the user so we’re actually aware of it. If I had to explicitly turn it on and then started having issues, I may have root caused this sooner.
I totally agree with this! Particularly on the Shield when you have not access to clean up temporary files on internal storage. I would have hoped however that internal testing would have picked up an issue this this!
Can anybody that was affected by this bug post a success story to confirm it’s working now before I take the plunge re-enabling it?
Plex Media Server 1.19.4.2935 is now available to everyone
- (Intro Detection) Reduce size of temporaries
- (Intro Detection) Store temporary files in the transcode temp directory
- (Intro Detection) Clean up old files on SHIELD (and use cache storage by default)
It seems to be. But i can’t find this version on PlayStore for now.
