MY Plex Media Server was upgraded to the latest and I found the common issue of my watched shows not being marked as watched. I read that I should uninstall PHT and install OpenPHT. There was no link for the Uninstall of PHT. I loaded OpenPHT. First I had issues with sound but was able to find that in the Preferences. The rest of the installation is very buggy, slow, inconsistent and frustrating. When I select a tv show series, if the music does not play I know that will have to wait two minutes until the show will start. Anyone else see this?
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (could only find the 32 bit version of OpenPHT)
AMD FX-6300 (6 core 3.5Ghz)
8G RAM
6TB RAID10
blah blah blah
@puterami said:
MY Plex Media Server was upgraded to the latest and I found the common issue of my watched shows not being marked as watched.
This is due to a known bug in PMS.
They changed the format of a version ID string, breaking compatibility with PHT and OpenPHT.
The most recent OpenPHT version has a fix for that problem, and the next PMS version should also fix it.
I read that I should uninstall PHT and install OpenPHT. There was no link for the Uninstall of PHT.
PHT and OpenPHT are installed in independent folders. Having both should not be a problem.
(Just don’t try to run them both at the same time, as that will cause hardware access conflicts.)
Uninstalling PHT should be possible in the same way as for any other programs under Win7, using the “Program and Features” section of the control panel, and if that doesn’t list PHT then your PHT installation was somehow broken.
I loaded OpenPHT. First I had issues with sound but was able to find that in the Preferences.
Most audio settings are found in the submenu:
Preferences > System (==cogwheel icon) > Audio Output
In the current version v1.6.2.123 that menu contains 15 different settings
The rest of the installation is very buggy, slow, inconsistent and frustrating. When I select a tv show series, if the music does not play I know that will have to wait two minutes until the show will start. Anyone else see this?
The ‘theme’ music that may play for some shows should have nothing to do with the speed of launching show episodes (unless there’s a bug involving both). Note that for some shows there will be NO music playing EVER, as such metadata is not available for some shows.
Since the results with theme music are inevitably inconsistent (some metadata samples are very loud) I always prefer to disable this theme music, which can be done in the submenu entry:
Preferences > Appearance (image icon) > Theme music > Enable TV theme music
However, the delay you mention before theme music does play could indicate a problem with your PMS server database.
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (could only find the 32 bit version of OpenPHT)
Both OpenPHT and original PHT use only 32 bit releases for Windows, since Windows has full backwards compatibility to 32 bit applications. Thus a single release serves for both 32 and 64 bit Windows systems.
I use Win7pro_x64 myself on two systems and Win7ult_x86 on two others, and all of them can use the same OpenPHT releases without any issues. They have widely differing specs, but this only means that I ‘tweak down’ some settings for the weakest system (like disabling the fanart auto slideshow).
The specs you mention should be sufficient for good and fast response with all features active.
Since that is not the result you get something other than the main system specs must be interfering.
I removed, rebooted, reloaded, rebooted. Found that I am still have the issue. Enabled debug logging and attached. The steps I did was opening WMC, selecting OpenPHT, selecting TV Shows, selecting “Two and a Half Men”, selecting Season 3, selecting the first show. I did not get theme music. It took almost wto minutes for the show to start. I let it play 4-5 seconds, then exited. When I selected “Quit”, it took another ~2 minutes to get back to WMC. In the log you can see where trouble starts below.
17:21:16 T:2112 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Process, request seek on source to 0
17:21:16 T:2112 INFO: CFileCache::Process - Hit eof.
17:21:16 T:520 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - waiting for position 4097.
17:21:16 T:520 WARNING: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - failed to get remaining data
17:21:16 T:2112 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Process, request seek on source to 0
17:21:16 T:2112 INFO: CFileCache::Process - Hit eof.
17:21:16 T:520 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - waiting for position 4098.
17:21:16 T:520 WARNING: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - failed to get remaining data
@dlanor Thanks for that! For some clarification, all of my shows have had no trouble playing the theme music with PHT,. You are correct, I can bring PHT up and play the shows (and theme music) just fine. I cannot go to Programs to uninstall PHT. When I tried, Windows told me that it could not find an uninstall and removed he entry. BTW, I did load the latest of OpenPHT last night which is the version showing this issue for me.
Hope I did the “@” correctly and I really do appreciate the replies!
@puterami Thanks for the log file. Like you have discovered something weird is going on with seek of theme music, suggest you:
Stop OpenPHT
Remove Database, ThemeMusicCache and Thumbnails from C:\Users\ralph\AppData\Roaming\OpenPHT\userdata (only contains non-important cached data that will be recreated once OpenPHT is running again)
Start OpenPHT
Try with use of FFMPEG AVIO transport enabled in Video playback preferences
Try with theme music disabled
Edit: Your issue seems to be that a theme music mp3 file is corrupt and takes about 2 minutes to read byte by byte. Suggest you check your drives for errors if this issue persists after the cached folders have been removed.
@Kwiboo - I should have thought about turning off theme music. After deleting the directories and turning off theme music, the 2-minute delay is gone. I did try enabling theme music again, got the same issue, then turned theme music back off. Still had the issue. Had to go back and delete those directories again and leave theme music off. Checked half of my tv shows listings and it is now starting fine. Thanks so much! I did enable and then again disable “Use FFMPEG AVIO for Network Transport”. If you have a second, can you tell me where I would find info on this parameter? The OpenPHT is loaded on the same machine as PMS so there is no network transport involved. Also, it is loaded to my system drive (darn it) and it’s an SSD. CheckDisk did find and fixed some errors.
The FFMPEG AVIO setting controls if buffers for reading media from PMS is handled by ffmpeg or by PHT/Kodi/libcurl. Was initially added to Rasplex to get rid of one extra buffer layer and push the Raspberry Pi 1 to its limits.
Well, finally sat down to watch a complete “That 70’s show”. About 3.5 minutes in, the show paused with “Seeking” and the controls. After about 45 seconds of this I backed out. Started PHT and it played the show fine. Thanks for the help but I am removing OpenPHT.
I have the same issue. With PlexHT all shows start immediately and the theme music always plays fine. But with OpenPHT 1.6.2 the theme music does not play. This makes me think that the issue is not on the server (since it would also affect PlexHT).
I have installed OpenPHT 1.6.2 just yesterday (on Windows 10). I never had a previous version of OpenPHT installed, I only used PlexHT until now. I had no stale OpenPHT configuration or data files in my user profile. I am using PMS on Debian Jessie, the version is 1.0.0.2261-a17e99e, the latest PMS package downloaded from http://shell.ninthgate.se/packages/debian
When I navigate to the show to the point when I expect the theme music, the debug log shows a ton of lines like this:
17:33:51 T:14412 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - waiting for position 14438.
17:33:51 T:14412 WARNING: XFILE::CFileCache::Seek - failed to get remaining data
17:33:51 T:17280 DEBUG: XFILE::CFileCache::Process, request seek on source to 0
17:33:51 T:17280 INFO: CFileCache::Process - Hit eof.
These four lines are repeatedly written to the log for exactly 30 seconds. The log gets pretty huge. If during this time I try to start the show, the whole GUI freezes until those 30 seconds pass. After the 30 seconds pass, the show starts.
Now, if I navigate to the show and wait for 30 seconds until the “XFILE::CFileCache” lines are no longer being written to the log file, and THEN start the show, it starts immediately.
I would guess that this is a combination of two bugs:
OpenPHT is not able to download the theme music from PMS. It tries to do that for 30 seconds until some timeout passes.
This should be fixed by analyzing why the music does not download.
Starting playback of the TV show waits until the theme music download finishes. Since it will only finish after the timeout passes, the start of playback is delayed.
This should be fixed by making sure that when I try to play a TV show, the attempt to download the theme music is immediately cancelled, since the theme music anyway is not needed anymore.
If I disable theme music in the preferences, the delay when starting playback goes away, so that is a workaround for this issue.
If I can provide you with any more information, or would like me to test a fix, please let me know. I would like to help solve this issue (I like my theme music :).
Update: I had some zero-length theme music files in AppData\Roaming\OpenPHT\userdata\ThemeMusicCache folder. When I deleted them suddenly everything works. I know, should have tried that before writing the long post :).
Anyway, maybe there still should be some kind of a fix, a zero-length theme music file in the cache should not make the whole application keel over. It should detect that the theme music does not match theme music on the server and re-download it. Or possibly at least detect zero-length files and delete them. Or make sure unsuccessful attempts at downloading theme music do not leave zero-length files in the cache. Or something.
