My Plex server is on a Windows 11 machine with a 2080 Super GPU and 3950x CPU; I’ve suddenly started getting a play error on all my client devices (including my web browser that opens when I double-click on the Plex Media Server icon in the system tray), but I have ‘Disable video stream transcoding’ on, and always have. Nothing about my setup has changed as far as I’m aware, so I don’t know why this has started happening or how to fix it.
Server Version#: 1.27.0.5849-99e933842
Hrm. If Disable video stream transcoding is enabled, that’s the error when trying to play any media that requires transcoding.
Web browsers don’t make great client devices, and often require transcoding.
My suggestion would be to un-check that checkbox!
Is there a reason you’ve disabled transcoding?
I had it disabled because I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of extra storage, quality loss, etc., as I’m not sharing Plex with any outside users, just using it to watch stuff across devices in my own home.
As I was first investigating this, I did uncheck the box, and it was giving the same error message. To be clear, this is happening on files I have previously played with no problems before.
Another potential wrinkle that might be relevant is that my libraries point to Google Drive folders that are mounted via the Google Drive for Desktop application.
That checkbox will never force anything to play directly. Disabling it will only cause failures if transcoding is required.
There are a million and one reasons transcoding might occur. Share the media xml info and the player types and we can make educated guesses.
Share server logs (easiest) and client logs (harder) and we can troubleshoot specifics.
my libraries point to Google Drive folders that are mounted via the Google Drive for Desktop application
If that process is transparent to Plex, it’s probably fine. If it means Plex sees stub files, or very slow access to files, it might be less fine.
That would be easy enough to test by copying a few files locally and creating an additional test library.
I’ve uploaded my Server Logs (I’m not very tech-literate, so I hope these are the correct format? I was expecting a txt file or something, not a zip lol)
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-06-04_21-35-36.zip (1.9 MB)
Here are two different xmls from the same show/source (i.e. their codecs are identical) – one that plays, one that doesn’t.
doesntplay.txt (11.0 KB)
plays.txt (11.0 KB)
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
