Server Version#: 1.25.0.5282
Player Version#: 8.27.0.29542
I’m running Plex server on Windows and have a folder which contains videos from a Youtube channel that get downloaded once per day (so they’re not movies or TV that pull series info etc). Until the latest update everything was working fine but since the latest update to server version 1.25.0.5282 the video screenshot is no longer being used as the thumbnail, I just get a black screen instead for every file.
Are there any known issues or settings I should check? I’m not really sure where to start looking, but everything was working perfectly until I updated to the latest version and on both 2nd and 3rd of December the videos for those days just have a black thumbnail.
This morning I’ve downgraded to Version 1.24.5.5173 and just selecting the few files that didn’t have thumbnails since the last update I can click Analyse and it generates the thumbnail correctly again.
I’ll stick with this version for now since I know this will probably be ignored by the Plex team, but it would be nice if this bug could be fixed.
To confirm this wasn’t an issue with my existing server I’ve now gone to the extent of installing a brand new PMS server on a new Windows install on a new PC, I’ve added a different library of video content and thumbnails are still not being generated.
So there’s definitely an issue and 1.24.5.5173 is the last version of PMS on Windows that works and generates the thumbnails correctly.
I’ve reinstalled Windows from scratch now on multiple systems. The difference in the log file between the working version and non working version appears to be:
Log from latest PMS server version that doesn’t generate thumbnails:
DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format yuv420p chosen by get_format().
ERROR - Format [PPMRAW] - DIB allocation failed, maybe caused by an invalid image size or by a lack of memory
DEBUG - Loaded memory image of size 0x0.
Log from earlier version 1.24.5.5173 PMS that does generate thumbnails:
DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format yuv420p chosen by get_format().
DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - All info found
DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - After avformat_find_stream_info() pos: 23732 bytes read:32768 seeks:0 frames:2
DEBUG - Creating C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Media\localhost\9\7f127ce0b8edf093bfa9ebdfa488083b35f85b0.bundle\Contents\Art\art1.jpg (25.0%, 1280x720).
DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format yuv420p chosen by get_format().
DEBUG - Loaded memory image of size 1280x720.
I’ve now reinstalled Ubuntu instead of Windows and run the latest PMS on Linux which works fine, all thumbnails being generated correctly again on the latest Plex server version. So this is a bug in the Windows server latest version of PMS only.
Looks like I may be switching to Ubuntu for my Plex server soon I guess.
Just to add another voice in the hope this get noticed and actioned upon - I am also experiencing the symptoms and ‘DIB allocation failed’ error and, as above, the only way to resolve it is to roll back to 1.24.5.5173.
This needs resolving as it severely impacts the usability of Plex in this instance.
A quick search seems to suggest that the error may originate from the use of the FreeImage open source library. Unfortunately this appears to have been statically linked to Plex so it’s not possible to just swap out the DLL for a previous version.
So just to follow up this conversation continued on a reddit post and we found that whatever change they made seems to only be an issue with older CPUs. A couple of us were running the Windows server with PMS as a virtual machine and doing nothing but upgrading the CPU fixed the issues with thumbnail generation in the latest PMS version.
Yea fortunately for me I was using a virtual machine so was able to update the CPU easily by changing settings but if your actual hardware has an older CPU this issue will be really annoying.
Short of actually upgrading the CPU the only choice is wait and see if Plex revert/fix the change or run on Ubuntu instead.
Not so easy when it’s soldered to the m’board.
Here’s hoping for a resolution - even if they can go back to dynamically linking the library(which it looks like it used to) so an older version can be swapped in.
