Transcoder is completely broken. Please help!

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.24.5.5173
Player Version#:

Running Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 for many months and never had a problem before that I couldn’t solve.

Playback of ALL new media fails. Transcoding of all media fails. I can’t find any logs or information whatsoever for the transcoder, and at no time do I see any indication that the transcoder is even attempting to do anything, so pretty sure it’s crashing instantly or not working whatsoever.

Things I’ve tried

  • Creating a whole new PMS library. My library is stored on an external drive at /media/…/Plex/Library/Application\ Support/Library… - so I tried removing that and creating a new library at /var/lib/… and still had the same issue
  • Removing and re-adding “Libraries”
  • Deleting Codecs folder (which gets re-created fine)
  • Deleting
  • Repointing the Transcoder folder (always used to be /media/…/scratch)
  • Deleting Transcoder folder (which gets re-created fine)
  • Reinstalling PMS over-the-top
  • Removing and re-installing PMS
  • Rebooting the Pi
  • Checking permissions of all affected Media / Library
  • Looked through logs, etc but found nothing whatsoever that looks at all useful.

This is really doing my head in as I’ve generally had no issue with fixing problems myself and as everything had been working perfectly a few days ago before updating to 1.24.5.5173 from 1.24.4.xxx I can’t help but feel it’s linked to that. I can’t find anything else whatsoever to back this up though.

2

It’s just broken. I been going through the same thing that you have.

3

Somewhat reassuring to not be the only one, but still not found a fix. Keep checking for updates.

4

I’ve fixed the issue, though not entire sure how.

I thought I’d post in case this is helpful to someone else though.

As my Plex library is on an external btrfs drive, first up…

  1. Checked the fstab ( sudo nano /etc/fstab ) and removed any unnecessary flags from how the volume was being mounted
  2. For the millionth time, I ran sudo chmod plex:plex /path/to/Plex
  3. I found a copy of the standard plex media server service.d file and copied and pasted it into the override.conf.
    I then hashed out any lines that I didn’t think would help, but left in more than I previously had (previously, I just had Environment=“PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR=/media/HFS/Plex/Library/Application Support”

Here’s what I have now (ignoring the commented out lines)

[Service]
Environment=“PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR=/media/EXTERNAL/Plex/Library/Application Support”
Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TMPDIR=/tmp
ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c ‘/usr/bin/test -d “${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}” || /bin/mkdir -p “${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}”’
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5
StartLimitInterval=60s
StartLimitBurst=3

Again, hoping that may prove useful to anyone else with similar issues!

5

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