Server Version#: 1.25.0.5220 on Windows
Player Version#: ROKU latest Plex Preview
Tuner Make/Model: HDHomeRun CONNECT QUATRO
Guide/Lineup name: N/A
Using XMLTV?: No
Channel number/Name: N/A
During a (long) pre-scheduled recording of an NFL game (using the DVR schedule mechanisms in PMS), after about 2.5 hours into the game I decided I wanted to start watching from the beginning. When I selected the “start from beginning” option on the in-progress game on my Roku player, I got an on-screen error indicating that playback failed due to lack of transcode disk space. I thought “huh, ok, weird, I figured that 8GB would have been enough for all of my playback scenarios and sources”. So, I figured I would just wait till the recording finished and try again. I have an 8GB RAM drive for transcoding (which I recently figured out is also used for recording).
I didn’t know at the time that both the recording and the playback would be using space in the transcoding (RAM) drive, and I also thought that the transcoding drive was a temporary spot that was actively managed by Plex Media Server to have enough space to accomplish whatever was necessary.
The biggest issue I had in this scenario is that the in-progress DVR recording STOPPED after this error cutting my game short unknown by me!
Upon searching the forums I came across this: Plex Transcoder RAM Drive Experience Which made me think the drives wouldn’t fill up if other Plex processes needed space and sessions would be cleaned up dynamically.
I think this might be a bug (especially since my recording got unknowingly canceled!), if it’s somehow NOT a bug, can someone please let me know how to control the amount of transcoding allowed per session? Or how often to flush the DVR recordings to disk and free the transcode space? And especially how to prevent recordings being cancelled by transcode errors!?
Not a bug.
Can’t control the amount of space used.
RAM drive isn’t built into Plex so there is no mechanism to flush to permanent storage.
Don’ run out of space.
Plex uses the temp/transcoder directory to store all the segments received from the tuner. In the likely event that you want to scrub back or start from beginning it needs to keep them till the recording is finished. Simultaneously it is concatenating these segments into a single file (.grab)
where if it gets to the end of the recording it will do post processing and them move to final location. Best case if you run out of space is you end up with an incomplete recording, if you happen to be time shifting it tends to just dump the file.
Mpeg2 is variable rate so you would have to figure 6-10 GB per hour times the number of channels being recorded.
Thanks for the reply @Tiebierius ! Appreciate the info and insight into how Plex uses that directory.
My understanding from the previous posts on the RAM drive topic made me think that Plex was constantly adding/deleting/cleaning up in that folder, but I guess that’s not actually the case and it’s just adding till those sessions die off. I also see how it’s not a bug now, and that the “out of space” would kill the in progress recording… It would be “nice” to have some control over that in the future, or even for Plex to add a RAM drive.
The only reason I’m mucking around with RAM drives is due to Plex smoking my last SSD. So, I guess for now I’ll use rotating disks for the transcode folder. I think they can handle the abuse at least slightly better than an SSD.
Thanks again!
p.s. Can you point me at the location of the .grab file where the ongoing concatenation is happening? Curious how that works.
