PMS raspberry pi error: transcoder exited due to an error

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1

Hi there,

Since today I got the error: ‘Playback terminated by the server Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error’

I’ve googled a but around on this forum and found it’s a quite common error. I have however not found a solution other than that i should rollback to an older version, which was discouraged by a plex staff member.

Therefore, could anyone assist me in how to fix this?

I was tinkering with the pi when this happened, i however do not know if it’s related:

  • I wanted to mount a usb drive in the pi, this did not work. I also rebooted the pi with the usb in which was not successful. After that I wanted to watch a video and the error was there. The thing is I did not perform any changed to mount the drive, so this should not affect the system. I’ve checked the connections with the exteral drives to the pi and they all function. I can even play music from a external drive using plex, but not a video, therefor I think the connection of the drive should not be the problem.
  • I updated my pi the day before after a long 3 week vacation (where the pi was tuned off), but the update seemed rather large. Raspbian even prompted me my old configuration files where saved in a new location and replaced with new ones. I however watched a couple of video’s after this update so this should also not be the problem.
  • I installed a heatsink on the processor (this should be completely irrelevant)

Some information about my system:

cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="9"
VERSION="9 (stretch)"
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian

uname -a
Linux server 4.14.52-v7+ #1123 SMP Wed Jun 27 17:35:49 BST 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
model name	: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
BogoMIPS	: 76.80
Features	: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 1
model name	: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
BogoMIPS	: 76.80
Features	: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 2
model name	: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
BogoMIPS	: 76.80
Features	: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 3
model name	: ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
BogoMIPS	: 76.80
Features	: half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm crc32 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

Hardware	: BCM2835
Revision	: a02082
Serial		: 0000000024b7ae7c

additionally I’ve gathered error data, I think the following line could be the most interesting:

Aug 07, 2018 16:03:45.572 [0x6a8ff400] ERROR - Sync: could not get sync list 20651604, sync item 28430898 to update status

the complete debug of this file can be found here:
Error log on raspberry pi

Thank you in advance

2

Your logs only indicate network connection problems. There is no transcoder crash or any other important error in the logs. There is also not even one start of a streaming session in the logs :wink: Please replicate the crash and post the new logs.

How do you connect your RPi to your network? WiFi or wired? Please do not use WiFi.

3

Hi there thanx for the reply!

My pi is connected to the internet via ethernet and is able to stream audio, but not video. I’ve tried this on multible devices. Audio works everywhere while Video does not.

I’ve created the error a couple of times again (tried to play a video, which did’nt work) and re-downloaded the crash logs.

I can however not find the error in the logs, in which of the files should this error pop up?

I’ve made a new selection of error files that could be relevant. These can be downloaded here:
Google drive

Thanx for the help!

1 Like
4

Aug 08, 2018 13:28:02.092 [0x682ff400] ERROR - Error creating directory "/media/plexmedia/PlexTranscode/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-1E051C71-A010-4721-B486-5AC14731275E-e4ca2b44-26bb-4325-b0ac-7909d5bb748e": boost::filesystem::create_directories: Permission denied: "/media/plexmedia/PlexTranscode/Transcode/Sessions"

Your PMS Linux user, most likely plex, does not have permissions to write to the Transcoder Temp directory. Do you know how to fix file permissions yourself or do you need a small tutorial?

Btw: the most important logs are always the Plex Media Server.log files.

5

Wooo thanx yes that’s it!
It’s a permission thing.

Weirdtough , I did grant that folder permissions some time ago…

sudo chmod -R ug-rwx /media/plexmedia/PlexTranscode

Thank you!

And I decided to finally figure out how the whole user-groups-permissions stuff works. I’ve been ignoring that for 3 years now.

So:
+1 for knowledge
+1 for system security
and most importantly:
+1 for your help! Thanx!

6

Just one thing: if /media/plexmedia does not use a Linux file system (e.g. NTFS instead of ext4) your permissions are most likely not saved persistently. By default, only the options given in /etc/fstab are used at next boot to determine the file permissions.

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