@ben-page - Is the error still arising in 1.15.0.659 ? There have been some changes in 1.15.0 that may reduce the likelihood of this specific issue arising
Could you let me see debug logs from 1.15.0.659 with these errors
@sa2000 Yes unfortunately it’s still happening with that release. I record a one-hour show every weeknight, and it works maybe 50% of the time. I will get the logs again for you. Do you also want to pcap file again?
Thanks for the feedback. Lets have the pcap as well as the logs. send me by private message
@ben-page as you cannot predict if it is going to fail, lets just go for logs for now and leave the pcap out
I tried PMing the logs. Let me know if you get them.
By the way since the last antenna adjustment at the beginning of the week (~5 days ago) I have seen 100% success rate in recording. So if I have the story right occasional sudden blasts of interference are causing recordings to go from looking perfect to abruptly stopping as the h.264 encoder on the HDHomeRun Extend hangs and the whole device reboots. In this case where the HDHomeRun reboots, Plex does not attempt to resume the recording. These blasts of interference are happening on the order of 1-2 times a day and in my case just fiddling with the antenna more while mounted on the roof made the difference between riding out these blasts of interference and failed recordings.
The signal strengths SiliconDust is reporting on their tuner for me is anywhere from +12 dBmV for the strongest UHF channel to -30 dBmV for strongest VHF channel. The failures were happening on a VHF channel. My understanding from SiliconDust is the optimal range of signal strength is from +6 dBmV to -24 dBmV with +12 dBmV being borderline too much and -30 dBmV getting into the range where they expect these blasts of interference to be an issue, but otherwise perfectly strong.
I have been looking at the logs for the afternoon/evening of 5th February recordings for channel 7.1 .
There were 3 back to back recordings for the same channel
15:30 to 16:00 ‘ABC World News Tonight With David Muir - E36 - Episode 36’
16:00 to 17:00 ‘Eyewitness News 4:00PM - Episode 02-05’
17:00 to 18:00 ‘Eyewitness News 5:00PM - Episode 02-05’
I can see the transcoder process for the 2nd recording getting stuck at 16:57. And the subsequent recording at 17:00 timed out and failed to get a stream from the channel. So possibly there was an with the streaming packets for that channel from 16:57
I would have expected the 2nd recording Plex Transcoder process to have failed / timed out rather than hang.
If you can recognize the problem and the problem repeats itself and when you check processes you find a stuck transcoder job, you could force a process dump with a kill -SEGV <pid> and provide the dump with the associated logs
I can then follow this up to see if we are leaving a transcoder session and not terminating
For the actual failure, it does look like an issue with the channel - may be signal / quality at the time
While it has been several days now since the last failure, I was wondering seeing SiliconDust has reported their device saw a burst of interference and then the h.264 encoder on the HDHomeRun Extend itself hung, causing the whole device to reboot, can a recovery mechanism be added to Plex, maybe even shifting to another tuner device after one has failed? Also my goal with the Extend in particular is to encode on the Extend itself and avoid costly re-encodes on the Plex server. Any recommendations for better optimizing this as it sounds like extra transcodings are happening?
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The failures were
One recording hung 3 minutes before the end of the 1 hour episode.
The immediately following recording failed to tune / start.
I will discuss recovery actions with the development team.
I was going to ask if the first recording that started at 15:30 and was for 30 minutes was actually ok? It was recorded into
/pub/Videos/Plex/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir (2014)/Season 2019/ABC World News Tonight With David Muir (2014) - S2019E36 - Episode 36.ts
Was this ok ? Was it full 30 minutes ? There were no errors logged for this recording
Yes, that one was good. Thanks.
Getting more and more Failures. Is this still related to Windows update?
Using Version 1.15.0.659 on Windows 10
Show Was American Housewife
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-02-19_19-30-01.zip (2.6 MB)
Could you get me logs from the current beta release of this error
Would like to have verbose logging for Plex Media Server and for the Transcoder
See setting TranscoderLogLevel - in hidden advanced settings
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201105343-advanced-hidden-server-settings/
Set it to verbose as well as enabling verbose and debug logging in server general advanced settings (web interface)
If you can also get packet capture for 127.0.0.1 that would be great
With verbose logging. logs would fill up quickly so please save soon after you get the error - you could consider LogNumFiles setting it to 10 or 20 decimal. Don’t set too high as log rotation would be a problem if too high.
Thanks
It is the same failure
Feb 19, 2019 19:16:09.010 [12216] ERROR - [Transcoder] [stream_segment,ssegment @ 03aa4800] Failed to open segment list 'http://127.0.0.1:32400/video/:/transcode/session/5ac6bd17-3aa9-4a9a-958e-ae4b3cd42765/ad336bd9-5c99-4fb2-87c4-3a0ac3287772/seglist?X-Plex-Http-Pipeline=infinite'
Feb 19, 2019 19:16:09.027 [16352] ERROR - [Transcoder] av_interleaved_write_frame(): Unknown error
Feb 19, 2019 19:16:09.029 [4684] ERROR - [Transcoder] Error writing trailer of media-%05d.ts: Invalid argument
If it is predictable, reproducible you could look into providing the diagnostics that ben.james is providing - see Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna - #218 by sa2000
and Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna - #68 by sa2000
and SOLUTION: Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error - #307 by sa2000
I turned on Verboose and will post once I get some errors.
See attached and the error for the recording of Ellen
Plex Media (2.1 MB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-02-26_19-07-11.zip (2.6 MB)
See Failure for American Housewife
I don’t believe you actually picked up what I said about the diagnostics. It was not just verbose logging on the server.
What I said
if it is predictable, reproducible you could look into providing the diagnostics that ben.james is providing - see Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna
and Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna
and SOLUTION: Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error
There were 3 elements
- server verbose
- transcoder verbose
- 127.0.0.1 packet capture using rawcap.exe
As follow up to my replies here Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna and Recording failed. Please check your tuner or antenna has there been any more hung recordings. If that arises again, where it appears a recording hung and subsequent one fails, would need to check if the Plex Transcoder process remains running and dump the process and this together with the logs may help understand why it hung and not fail. It may be difficult to spot - so may need to check logs for further failures to see if same pattern repears itself. May also require getting a capture from the channel using curl
There have been a few more failed recordings. They keep happening outside of points in time where I can capture useful logs, but I will see what I can do to grab info as time goes on, opportunistically grabbing as you mentioned above. For the first week or so after the last antenna adjustment as far as I can tell all of the recordings were flawless. It is just more recently I am seeing glitches in the recordings. Also for the failed recordings it seems the pattern so far is two recordings fail in a row around 11 minutes in.
I think I mentioned this before, but when SiliconDust checked the signal strength last the strongest UHF channel was just above +12dBmV and the strongest VHF at -30 dBmV. The failed recordings are primarily happening on the VHF band.
I’m just venting here… But can someone riddle me this?
How can Plex, the definitive and proverbial current Heavyweight contender in media viewing, be so utterly far behind most any other package in terms of Live TV viewing and recording?
I’m talking SageTV…NextPVR…Emby…heck, Jellyfin?
I cannot even begin to tell you how many failed recording I get from Plex and yet I get perfect recordings from any of these I previously mentioned.
Signal…? 94% Strength and 100% Symbol Quality.
Logs? These cannot be one off situations, that fringe case users are needed to solve the 1% issue. In any case, there have been enough logs given from any number of users, to solve any number of issues.
I just want this to work… Period. If there is something that is beyond my ‘kin’, and I need to better understand the inner workings of TV transmissions to grasp the number of things that can, and obviously do, go wrong, how is it that others are doing it where there is no issue?
If the way Plex is ‘doing’ it is the question, then I say, “Hows that working for you?”
…Just frustrated.
I am looking and yesterday the problem was Plex only selected a few of its scheduled records to record. Today it looks like it is only planning to record 2 things late this evening even though when you go to the guide, it lists all of the shows it is supposed to be recording; just won’t let you actually select it for recording. After today it has its normal scheduled recording list shown. So yeah, hard to monitor for failed recordings and send back logs when it refuses to select things to be recorded in the first place.
