Transcode scratch drive and Live DVR

General Discussions Plex Features
1

Hi guys,

Troubleshooting an issue I am having with the Live DVR and I think I might have narrowed it down to my scratch drive I use for transcoding.

When watching Live TV for an extended period of time (like last night with the Super Bowl), I start getting buffering within the stream.

If I exit the channel and come back to it, the stream stays good for a while again. I also noticed that the transcoding scratch drive (I have 10GB RAM disk getting used for this), is sitting at 90MB remaining space when the buffering starts. So, I am thinking that the buffering may be due to the scratch drive getting full. I was only person transcoding at that time, no other streams were active.

Questions on this: Is there a recommended scratch drive size I should be looking at? I understand that live TV takes up some decent space, but I would think that 10GB would be multiple hours worth of space, instead of just a little over an hour. I haven’t really noticed this issue before yesterday, as most shows I watch are an hour or less.

Please help me understand how much space my scratch drive needs per hour of live TV and how does Plex decide what to keep in the scratch drive? I am assuming that this is so that you can rewind, how far back can I rewind? Any way to control this within the system, to reduce the scratch file size?

P.S. Thanks for all your work on the live TV side. I am now 100% consuming all of my media through Plex. Been a PlexPass subscriber for over 4 years now (probably should just pay the lifetime fee…lol)

2

No one knows? :neutral:

3

Honestly I’m using a 3TB scratch drive and I have seen it fill to be upwards of 20+ Gb depending on how many streams and how long it’s actively running for. My scratch drive choice was totally based on what was available to me at the time not any particular reason for the size.

You have to remember you are scratching as both mpeg2 I believe as well as mpeg4. I would have to look and see but I think it buffers the mpeg2 content in one folder and then transcodes the stream to mpeg4 and buffers it in a separate folder.