Recording process hangs (doesn't finish) on MacOS X

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1

I tried a few search terms and didn’t see anyone else with this issue, so apologies if this is already known.

I’m running Plex Media Server 1.7.5.4035 on a 2010 Mac Mini running Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11.6). I’m using an HDHomeRun Connect to record TV.

Sometimes, it works great. Other times, the recording process will hang and won’t stop recording at the designated time. This creates a cascade of failures where later programs I’ve scheduled for recording are shown as recording in the UI but the recording process appears to never actually start.

In this screenshot you can see the result of this bug - 6 shows shown as recording simultaneously, and a menu saying that there are 2 transcoding ops currently active. At the time of the screenshot, the recordings that had started were sitting in the .grab directory. When I cancelled the transcoding ops, several shows (for which recording never actually started) disappeared out of my schedule, and the ones that had completed but hung transferred over to their intended destination folder(s).

I’m comfortable with Terminal and looking at log files, but am not sure where to begin to track down the cause of this issue. I’d appreciate any help.

2

I am having the same exact problem only its on windows 10 and my mac, i tried them both and they do the same thing hanging up and not finishing a record and stuck in the .grab folder. I am also using a homerun connect.

3

Look at the Plex Media Server log

4

@johnm_ColaSC said:
Look at the Plex Media Server log

Ok. What within the file should I look at? Nothing in the file looks suspicious to me.

5

So nothing in the logs dealing with the shows displays any messages?

I also recently saw a post on a different thread where I believe the user discovered some recordings that were set to Optimize seemed to be causing some recordings to stay for longer than usual in the recording schedule. Jobs were optimizing for mobile display and was causing the transcode process to wait for the optimization. Don’t know if you have any of these shows being optimized after recording or not.

6

Thanks for returning to help me a bit further along.

During the previous incident, I found logs indicating that a process started to record the shows, but no obvious warnings or errors.

Under Plex’s DVR settings, I don’t see any Optimize options. I checked a few other sections such as “Optimized Versions” and “Transcoder” but did not see anything that I’d think would cause my issue.

Also, I am not using any sort of postprocess script at this time (keeping things simple until I can get simple things working).

This morning, I got some different errors - Plex says of two shows, “The recording was aborted.” Hm. At this point, I don’t know if this new error has any relation to the prior one, but here is a log block of the event. I’ve boldfaced some interesting items.

Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.370 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Starting operation for 'Lassie - E28 - Operation Woodland'.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.379 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - Activity: registered new activity af075889-ff77-4d1a-beba-4db8c8d4fb51 - Recording
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.379 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: HDHomerun starting a media grab on device device://tv.plex.grabbers.hdhomerun/104A11DF tuner 0.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.382 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Subscription: Resolved subscription to library item 'Lassie' (80069)
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.383 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - There were 1 top-level paths for Lassie.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.384 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Saving recording to /Users/Shared/TV Shows/.grab/d8f416ef44672d9a50729d9452c2659b044e545e
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.409 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Going to record for 1800 seconds, final URL is http://192.168.1.18:5004/auto/v12.2
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Setting timer to stop grab of 'Lassie - E28 - Operation Woodland' in 1800 seconds.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Waiting for a tuner (2 available).
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Allocated a tuner (1 left)
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] ERROR - DVR:Recorder: **Error 3 starting the record**, shutting things down.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Freed a tuner (now 2 available)
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] ERROR - DVR:Recorder: **Error 3 starting the record,** shutting things down.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Operation for Lassie - E28 - Operation Woodland completed with status error (**The recording was aborted**)
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.418 [0x700000a4d000] DEBUG - Activity: Ended activity af075889-ff77-4d1a-beba-4db8c8d4fb51.
Jul 05, 2017 06:00:00.419 [0x700000a4d000] ERROR - DVR:Grabber: Starting media grab failed.

I tried searching for “Error 3” in Plex’s support pages and found nothing. Tried with Google and got: No results found for plex dvr “error 3 starting the record”. If I could find information on what Error 3 is, I could try and troubleshoot this second error.

Always frustrating when trying to get to the bottom of an issue, and new issues arise before you can fix the prior ones. :lol:

7

I am having the same issue on a QNAP running 1.7.5.4035 and a HDHomeRun Connect to record TV.

8

Same issue here with Ubuntu 16 and HDHomeRun (kind with 2 tuners and without built in transcoder)

9

Many users are having this issue in recent releases. The only fix seems to be rolling back to an older version of PMS.
See this thread for versions that are issue free.

10

FYI, simply quitting and restarting Plex cleared up the Error 3; the next two recordings appear to have succeeded.

So from this, I can conclude that after cancelling the previous hung transcodings, Plex was still in a bad state.

Definitely something wrong with the current builds of Plex. I guess that’s why it’s still in Beta. And if multiple users have reported the issue, I’d like to think that the devs will be able to reproduce it themselves or have reached out to one of the users reporting the problem for more information.

Thanks lorddoskias!

Edit: For anyone else landing on this thread, the “winning” (most commonly discussed/updated) thread on this topic appears to be the helpfully titled DVR Recording - Streaming Pile of Goo!

11

Glad it helped! Hopefully the devs will be able to help us all out soon.