I am also having fairly consistent transcoding issues. pre-1.10.* I had no issues, but the latest few releases have caused a lot of issues with media playing steadily. I also see an issue accessing Server Settings screens at the same times that the transcoder is having issues.
I have several people that utilize my server and generally have about 2-5 separate streams going at once. I am running plex on a Ubuntu 16.04 server VM with 6 virtual cores and 8GB RAM with a 100GB of space allocated to just plex. All Media is stored in a separate FreeNAS server sharing over an NFS share, mounted on the plex server.
I’m on server version Version 1.9.6.4429 limited by FreeNAS team so I cannot just download on my own, and nor am I techy enough to try that. There simply is no “DO NOT TRANSCODE” setting. I hate transcoding. It’s put in by default, needs a fast CPU (opposite of what a server should have) and slows my watching to a crawl because of audio transcoding of Dolby Digital 5.1 to 2.0 channel if I watch on a TV with plex app. This is horrible so I got rid of Plex completely and I’m gone.
It looks like I was a bit too optimistic. The video actually terminating due to the shaka error displaying on screen rarely occurs and I’m still effectively where I was before this latest update (stuck buffering at the last second of the video and subtitles disappearing prematurely). This isn’t just stuff with my media either. I’ve checked in with friends on varying versions of Plex and come to the same problems on their media as well, even on different browsers.
Update:
I’ve only ran a few tests now, but it seems that when I watch plex by going to app.plex.tv, I saw that the errors were still spammed in the console and subtitles still seemed to easily break, but it did actually move onto the next video.
I really don’t want to use app.plex.tv for my access, so I went ahead and added my custom server url to my server (just in case there was some bizarre problem caused by that), disabled webhooks, restarted the plex server, and cleared all of my cache and etc. We’ll see how this turns out, but the initial tests so far are promising. I tried running through a few videos that failed almost 100% of the time and they actually continued with autoplay. The subtitles not showing up when I jumped to the end of the video still occurs, but … at least it’s something. Now we’ll just see how long it takes before it simply breaks again.
Since the update to 1.10.1.4561 I have had lots of issues with transcoding and video recording in general. Recordings seem to stop and start and the start again, so that during a one hour recording I might end up with 4 separate files that don’t accumulate to more than about 30 minutes of video. Since jumping to 1.10 I typically about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 DVR recordings fail.
My system:
Windows 8 ASUS Workstation
Intel Core i7-3770, quad core w/ 8 logical processors
16GB RAM
Multiple 7200RPM drives (I always record to one and then have temp transcode directory on another and output to a third, so it’s never reading and writing to/from the same drive.)
I reverted back to 1.9.7.4460, because I didn’t have transcoding issues like this or recording issues like this before 1.10. But even with an uninstall and reinstall, the same issues persist now on a version where they didn’t before.
I’d really like to echo some of the comments I’ve heard and seen from others, that as much as I love new features, I think Plex development has gotten ahead of themselves. They seem so eager to push out new functionality that they are introducing new issues and not fixing them even though they seem to think they are. Go back and look at release notes, under fixes, you’ll see the same issue being reported as “fixed” in multiple versions. That tells me that there’s some sloppiness going on in QC.
Glad you had some luck there. Mine seems to have reduced in frequency, but still occasionally comes up after the stuff I did last. I actually haven’t had the auto adjust quality enabled because I always want it at the highest… but I’ve found it completely ignores the fact I have it disabled and uses auto anyways, which is quite annoying. I’d rather buffer than drop to some crap resolution… ya’ll got any more of them pixels? Sometimes while completely ignoring the fact I have auto disabled, it decides to encode video that doesn’t need to be encoded at a higher bitrate than the source. Wasting not only processing resources, but bandwidth while it’s at it… but that’s only happened a few times. haha
