Random media fails to playback randomly on random devices (often VC1 but h264 too)

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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CCWGTVlog.zip (26.7 KB)
Server Version#: 1.25.0.5246
Player Version#: All newer versions, beta and stable across many devices.
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-11-25_14-11-10.zip (3.0 MB)

I have attached server logs and logs from the Chromecast With Google TV.

Ever since the sunset of the older Smart TV clients like older Samsungs, most of my users have been complaining of an issue where often my media wont playback. I know its not a problem with any of my hardware or theirs. I have been using plex for many years and so have my users. We know how to troubleshoot. The error we get is “An Error occurred while attempting to play this video. Please check your connection and try again.”

The problem happens on a huge variety of devices. 2016-2019 Samsungs, roku streaming stick plus, iOS player, CCWGTV. It mostly happens with VC1 files, but also happens with H264 files. The playback issues arent consistent. For example, I had a friend with the iOS app who couldnt playback Lord of the Flies, but me on the beta iOS app could. The issue seems to come and go by the day. Some days its fine, some days they cant play any VC1 or H264 content. And the client changes daily too.

I havent been able to nail down any device to get logs until recently. I attached logs from my Chromecast with Google TV trying to playback VC1 content. I get the same error. I know the file is perfect because I freshly ripped it personally again.

I most frequently have issues with newer Samsung TV clients though. I will note that I havent had these issues with my Shield Pro though. (though i do have various other problems with it).

Am I the only one dealing with this? Its so frustrating, I have like 30 friends watching off my server who have been watching for years. Now most of them have gave up on Plex because 50% of the time, their client just doesn’t work.

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Your issue sounds similar to mine. I got a report of an issue in the last week of the same error message, which is pretty vague, though my user also reported that on the windows player, he gets an s1002 error message instead of just an error occurred. I’m not sure the error message is relevant since it’s a network error message, and my testing has led me to VC1 files while using hardware acceleration for transcoding. Your post doesn’t talk about your setup at all. Are you doing hardware transcoding with an nVidia GPU? If you are, try disabling hardware acceleration in the transcode menu for your PMS.

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I am on unraid, using a QuickSync with hardware transcoding. It seems like disabling transcoding fixes the problem. Well that’s both good and bad haha.

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Other people are starting to report similar issues on my post I created on the forums here. One guy said he had both an Intel and nVidia based hardware accelerated server with the issue. My assumption is that Plex changed something with a recent update that broke VC1 transcoding. So at least we have a band-aid fix for now with disabling hardware acceleration, but obviously not ideal if you have a lot of transcoding going on concurrently.

Glad to see another unRAID user on here though!

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Can you link your post?

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