Once Sonic Analysis dropped and I started to play with it, I started to pay closer attention to what PMS was doing… because SA wasn’t working as I expected! But in the Task Manager process names like Plex Transcoder.exe don’t tell you much, and they can lead you to bad assumptions.
There is a pretty great free tool available from Microsoft that is like a souped up Task Manager, and it can tell you more about what those processes are doing. It’s Process Explorer.
The nice thing about Process Explorer is that it will show you the command line used to invoke a process. So, what is the transcoder doing right now? Mouse over the process or get Properties, and it will tell you.
Looks like even though my Activity Monitor shows idle, Plex is chewing on my TV show library. Not sure why but if I examined the command line and my library settings, I am sure I could figure it out.
The command lines are not always so clear, but it’s a start!
The PMS logs also show us tons of info, but if you want to see what Plex is doing right now, just looking at the text file isn’t great.
In PowerShell the Get-Content command can show you file updates, and you can pipe those lines into the Select-String command to show only lines you care about.
PS > Get-Content "C:\Users\YOUR_ACCOUNT\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Logs\Plex Media Server.log" -Tail 30 -Wait | Select-String "sonic"
Get-Content has many possible arguments. Here, -Tail 30 shows the last 30 lines when it starts, and -Wait prints new lines as they arrive. Select-String has tons of options too, but "sonic" is a case-insensitive match. So, this PowerShell command will show you any line with “sonic” as soon as it is written, no matter how it is capitalized.
(Interestingly I can see Sonic Analysis working right now… it’s loading the Temp directory with wav files, over 600 so far, though the album countdown isn’t beginning.)
This isn’t super advanced sysadmin magic but I hope it helps someone figure out what PMS is doing!
“We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.”
― Earl C. Kelley
