I just got a HDHomeRun Connect after talking my wife into it so we could record with Plex since I just talked her into letting me get a Plex Pass not that long ago (yes, lots of talking into, lol). Well, everything I have tried to record so far fails with a transcoder error.
At first, I had it recording to an external hard drive that was connected to her computer over the network. I thought it would work. Apparently I was wrong.
So, I though that maybe I should try to do a local recording onto one of the drives in my computer that PMS is running on. That didn’t work so well either.
At that point I tried changing the transcoding directory to a folder on the same drive it is recording to. That made it worse. At first, it was recording like 3/4 of the show I would say. Now it is failing after 2 minutes.
Can anyone help me figure out how to fix this? I really want it to work.
Can you provide more details around the specifics of the PMS environment?
I see you’re running Windows.
I also see that you are recording to a F:\temp. Not sure why you have that location specified. I would normally expect to see something like F:\TV or F:\Movies or something similar.
What type of drive is this? Internal or External? How much storage space is there on the drive? What is the file system of the drive? NTFS, FAT32, or something different?
I also see you have the Plex Transcode set to the same F:\Temp location. Have you tried leaving it to default to the Plex AppData folder location?
Yeah, I am running Windows 10.
I only set it to F:\temp when recording to my wife’s external drive (formerly mapped as X:\recordings on a 4TB external Seagate drive connected to a Mac Mini), but I changed it from there when I started having the transcoder issues.
The drive it is recording to now is a 4TB internal drive NTFS formatted with like 600GB or so free on it. Plenty of room to test a few shows.
Like I said, I only put the transcode to that location just as a test when the default location (on my D drive) was used prior. I thought maybe it was the issue.
While I was waiting for someone to see this, I rebooted my machine and have started recording Big Brother and The Goldbergs. So far it is doing ok, but it isn’t to the end of either episode just yet. It appeared to have the error and stop more towards the end of episodes so I will withhold a victory proclamation until it is done completely.
I just don’t want this to be a recurring issue because I don’t want my wife thinking we wasted money or anything that would cause me to get yelled at.
Hmm, well, those two recorded just fine. Maybe it was some kind of error that required a reboot of my computer. I guess I can change it back to using my wife’s drive for putting the recordings to and see if it still works.
If you switch back to the Mac mini and an external HD be aware that some external drives may stop the disk when it is inactive. When Plex is ready to record it expects the drive to be ready, a slight hesitation by the drive spinning back up could cause failed recordings. My recommendation would be to setup recordings on the internal disk, then setup some script to move the recordings to the external disk. Your library could be configured with both the internal disk record location and the external disk folder location. I use a similar process on my Primary Plex setup. I have one drive dedicated to recordings G:\TV_DVR. I then have 3 other folders that store recordings. My script runs every 5 minutes to move any recordings in G:\TV_DVR to F:\Recorded TV. I have some other processing with Handbrake to transcode to HEVC and then they are moved to F:\Recorded TV_HEVC.
Windows should have a utility called called RoboCopy installed. If not you can download it from Microsoft. I have one line in a script that copies files found in the record folder to another storage location:
/Move - self explanatory
/S - Copy subdirectories but not empty ones
“G:\TV_DVR” - From
“F:\Recorded TV” - To
/XD “G:\TV_DVR.grab” - Exclude the .grab folder where recordings still processing are at
If you are going to be running this on the Mac mini obviously you would need to investigate a similar process for Mac OS.
I can tell this is going to irritate me. I recorded a couple of shows this morning, one of which was The Price is Right complete with commercial removal on TPIR. When it tried to record two shows back to back just now, they both had the damned transcoder error again. I don’t understand what the problem is if 2 shows were able to record this morning, then all of the sudden it can’t record again. NOTHING has changed. Ugh! This is irritating.
EDIT: It isn’t because it was trying to record to my wife’s external drive on her machine again, either. I made a different directory on my local machine and just now tried to record something to it and immediately it failed with the transcoder error message. I shouldn’t have to reboot the machine multiple times a day to get it to record right.
And of course after I do a reboot of my entire machine it worked. Well, except for at the end of the first two things I tried to record PMS crashed. I had to restart it. Since then, the ABC and CBS news broadcasts are recording. Each to a different location, just as a test. Oh, well, after I reconnected to the networked drive. LOL
What could there possibly be with PMS that makes it impossible to record shows without getting a transcoder error after it has been up for a while??? Why would I have to reboot the machine to get it to work??? This is really frustrating.
Well, it did it again. I literally have to reboot my computer multiple times a day before I can get it to record right. I wish I understood what was going on. Guess there aren’t many people here that can help me.
A last attempt to ask for help, here are my logs. It includes the failed recording from just half an hour ago. It is ridiculous how this won’t work right.
It recorded for a whole 10 seconds it seems going by the playback of the file that was saved. It was the one at 08:00 this morning. PLEASE can anyone tell me what the heck is going on with this???
Do I need BOTH 5421 and 0917? Or would installing 0917 be enough? I ask because I just told windows to check for updates and it is only installing 0917.
I would say yes. On the other thread discussing this issue a user had the third update but not the second and from what I recall was still experiencing the issue. You may need to manually install the 5421 update.
Hmm, very odd, I just tried to install it and it said it wasn’t applicable to my system. Perhaps the automatic installation of 0917 covered part of it? I chose the proper package. I have an x64 based processor and installed the x64 package. Well, not sure what to do then other than wait and see if the problem is resolved, I suppose.
Well, hope I’m not jinxing myself here, but apparently that one package solved the issue. Thank you @johnm_ColaSC for pointing me in that direction. Things have gone well so far since I installed it.
