Recording not ending. Partial or non-existent recordings. Commercials not removed

[dshanks01]

I suggest NOT switching to the python3 version for now. Last evening after I canceled a recording of a football game mid-game, my locast2plex stopped threw multiple unhandled exceptions and then stopped writing to stdout and stderr. It’s still running, but none of the shows scheduled to record later were recorded. Again, I’m not sure if the fault is with locast2plex or Plex itself, but if you have a mostly working system right now you’d be wise not to modify it.

EDIT: It was running, but it wasn’t listening on its port. I had to restart it. I also kludged up a cron job to detect when it fails and restart it automatically.

[CraigA57]

@dshanks01

@CraigA57

Now if I could just figure out why Star Trek: Discovery won’t record.

Isn’t that on CBS All Access? Locast2plex only has access to broadcast channels. Or are you telling me there’s a station in the Seattle area that broadcasts Star Trek: Discovery?

P.S. In an earlier comment I said that, without transcoding, recordings would be MPEG encoded instead of H.264. I took a look at last night’s recordings and all of them are H.264 (AKA AVC) without transcoding. It looks like the stations I’m recording encode their broadcasts in H.264. That’s yet another reason not to have Plex transcode the video it records (at least for me).

Yes, I also noticed H.264 720p ADTS Stereo with subtitles which is just what I want for most recordings which delete themselves in a week or less. If there is a bandwidth advantage, I’d be willing to bet Locast does the transcoding at their OTA receivers prior to transmission.

There are only a few I keep long term, like Star Trek: Discovery which I typically convert by hand to H.265 to save space.

Yes, Star Trek: Discovery airs locally on CBS Channel 7.1 Thursday evenings @10pm. Just noticed last night S01E03 aired, which I missed because I had to do other things. Just noticed this is Season 1, not Season 3, so this may be a meus culpa moment since I was paying more attention to “NEW” in the Guide. I checked my PMS logs, not a clue about why the recording didn’t start when others did/do start. I checked specific date/times in both “Plex Tuner Service.log” and “Plex Media Server.log” for both successful and unsuccessful recording times. No differences and no clues.

Online CBS says Discovery Season 3 is supposed to debut 15 Oct, probably as you suggest on CBS All Access, so probably not on our local CBS channel. I think Netflix Europe also carries it if you have access to that, something about CBS All Access might be violating EU broadcast rules.

The local guide says:

Since I can explain Star Trek: Discovery not recording as a possible meus culpa senior moment mixing up Season 1 with Season 3 while looking at “NEW”, I can, with some lingering concern, say my setup appears to be working. I hope “To Be Announced” means at least S03E01 will be aired as a “teaser” marketing campaign effort to collect CBS All Access customers.

And turning off Locast Tuner compression seems to be a big win from this effort.

[CraigA57]

A little more weirdness in Plex DVR. Notice the Guide says “RECORDING SCHEDULED”

Yet when DVR is inspected, notice Thur 10/15 doesn’t contain the show and “RECORDING PRIORITY” says “No upcoming airings”.

I can see a number of reasons why this show might not record, but there are still all the indications in the Guide which suggest it -definately- will record. Yet another reason why we NEED Manual Recording (specify channel/date/time and how long or end time)

Another minor point; with just remuxing the TS file to MKV (not changing content) it looks like a space savings of 10% can be achieved:

Remuxing is fast/easy using MKVToolNix

I verified using Plex and VLC that Subtitles/Video/Audio are still available, they didn’t get stripped in the conversion process.