Thumbnail generation seems to crash?

General Discussions
1

I’ve recently begun an “audit” of my media library to change out H.264 content with H.265 to save storage space, and ultimately re-loaded roughly 300-400 media files in the last couple of weeks. I’ve noticed that a lot of the new additions still don’t have video preview (BIF) thumbnails associated with them, and it’s been several days/weeks. I have my server set to generate thumbnails on addition to the library, as well as a scheduled task (which is scheduled daily between 3:00-7:00 A.M. EDT.).

I’ve observed the CPU “trying” to or otherwise starting to create thumbnails, at least as near as I can tell. After rebooting the server, and running the “Analyze” function against my movie library, the CPU jumps and stays steady at a good 50-60% CPU utilization, indicating (I assume) it’s crunching away at making thumbnails. After a while, though (maybe an hour or so), the CPU utilization drops to idle (assuming no viewers are streaming anything), and the vast majority of newly added media still have no thumbnails.

I’m aware that this process can take a LONG time, but would still expect to see progress to some degree or another, and my gut feeling is that there’s a specific media file that is causing the analyzer/thumbnail generator to crash whenever it reaches it and tries to process it. I’ve tried taking a look at the “Plex Media Scanner Analysis” log to see if I can easily identify anything, but without knowing what to look for, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.

I’ve posted the Plex Media Scanner Analysis log here, not knowing if it’s the correct log, but am more than happy to provide any other logs for analysis. If anyone has any insight into how Plex logs video thumbnail generation (and any associated errors or crashes), I’d greatly appreciate any assistance you may offer. Happy to do the analysis and troubleshooting myself, but not sure quite where to start, and hoping someone else either directly associated with Plex or experienced enough in troubleshooting this kind of thing can point me in the right direction. Thanks for taking a read, and hopeful anyone can help!

2

Forgot to mention and it may be impactful - Once the analyzer/video thumbnail generator “crashes” the first time, I can re-run the “Analyze” function against my movie library, and the server shows the analyzer is crunching through all files and makes it to the end of my movie library, but the CPU usage doesn’t change - it’s as if the analyzer portion of the service is working, but the thumbnail (BIF) generator simply doesn’t activate or start crunching. If I close/reopen the Plex server software or reboot the whole server and try again, CPU spikes up to 50-60% for a while, and then stops (as described in my original post). Any subsequent attempts to analyze show this behavior I just described - analysis progresses, but no CPU usage associated with thumbnail generation. I have to restart the software/server to try again.

Without knowing if they’re separate elements of the process or what to look for, not sure what’s going on.