Server Version#: 1.43.1.10611
Player Version#: tried roku stick, roku ultra, android, web player, etc
I had to replace the plex jail on my FreeBSD server for an unrelated reason, so I’m starting from scratch on a new jail originally on 14.3, but I’ve since upgrade to 14.4 and now 15.0, hoping something would magically work. I believe I have all the same settings that worked on my previous jail and I’ve installed PMS from the latest pkg repos.
The issue is that any time I try to watch something that requires transcoding (whether for audio or video), I can see the transcoded files being outputted to the correct path on the server, but the client hangs and never gets a response. I can see the Plex Transcoder process running and doing it’s job, but when the process disappears in top is about when I see the PMS output a bunch of entries along the lines of “Transcode runner appears to have died… Sending back blank segment for …” How can I debug this? This has been an issue for about 2 weeks, and I can watch some content (anything that direct plays), but my family is getting pretty pissed at me…
All the plex processes are running as the user “blank” (1002) and the owner of /var/tmpdisk is blank:blank (1002:1002) with 0755 permissions. This is the same for all directories under /var/tmdisk including Transcode and Transcode/Sessions.
While the transcoder is running, I can see the ts files under Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-{some-identifier}/media-{segment-id}.ts. Once it crashes, it cleans up the “plex-transcode-{identifier}” folder just fine and deletes the ts files.
I’m curious why we’re using a non-standard user here. Not saying it’s the cause of the problem but since Plex has its own user account already it feels like an unnecessary change in the server operation.
Does it change anything if you don’t override the transcode directory and let it use the default?
No it doesn’t change anything, the transcoded files get written but not streamed.
I’m curious why we’re using a non-standard user here. Not saying it’s the cause of the problem but since Plex has its own user account already it feels like an unnecessary change in the server operation
It’s a pattern I came up with 10ish years ago, idk if it makes sense, but basically I have separate jails writing to the data drive that is mounted into each jail, so I wanted a consistent user/group in the different jails so that the files had the same ownership across them. I don’t think it’s the issue, everything used to work with this model, and direct play works fine as well as the transferring, just not the streaming of the transcoded files…
If you use Plex to optimize some media, does that work?
Was Plex installed manually or from the pkg?
I don’t see anything that gives me any clues in those logs. Usually the Plex guys want you to include the server startup messages when sharing logs. It’s worth restarting the server, waiting a minute, and then attempting to play something, and then sharing those logs.
I restarted the server and tried to load the same video, I didn’t let it run as long, but it should give the startup details for the server.
I tried to optimize the same video and it immediately failed saying “Unable to convert”, which is strange because the behavior when streaming is that it actually runs for a bit (minutes) and then eventually fails, and the converted video files are in the transcode folder when trying to stream, which I don’t see in this case.
I installed it from pkg, just as I had before. I got into this mess by cleaning things up on the server and destroying a jail that happened to share the same root zfs filesystem without realizing it, so it wiped my plex installation out. I think I’ve set everything up as I had it before, but I just can not get it to stream the transcoded results.
