Server Version#: v1.43.4.10903-e5521bd8c
Player Version#: Not sure how to find this, perhaps not relevant?
Server logs: Plex Media Server Logs_2026-09-22_21-37-44.zip (75.1 KB)
I’ve cleaned out the log directory so this is only of one run of the server
This issue manifests in media randomly starting to buffer & never finishing.
Server is running on Arch Linux, media is on a ZFS storage pool (pool is healthy). PMS is installed using the plex-media-server-plexpass AUR package (but the same issue also happens with plex-media-server). GPU hardware is Intel ARC A310. Tried with hardware transcoding on/off, same issue.
In the “Plex Media Server.log” file, the lines at “Sep 22, 2026 21:29:27.526” happen right as the problematic content is loaded in the client. “No such file or directory” sounds worrying.
Thanks in advance for any help!
I haven’t looked at your logs, but do your drives spin down? I’ve seen that error when drives spinning back up take longer than plex is expecting. If you try playing back right away does it work?
I can’t easily monitor physical drive activity, but all software metrics tell me the drives are very much active. I should note that this can happen randomly during media playback, it does not just happen on a “cold start” (giving the server some idle time before resuming). If the issue happens, it is 100% reproducible (I can open a problematic episode of a TV show right now, skip to a certain moment, and it’ll happen 100% of the time). So, that does not sound like hard drive activity-related issues to me.
If you can reproduce with specific files at a specific point in the file, could it be an issue with the file? The file playing back in another software does not rule out issues with the file. Plex is pickier.
Hm, I transcode all my media to AV1 (using hardware NVENC on a separate machine), so I would assume that if that would produce problematic output, it’d produce it for all files.
The problem also shows up for media that should definitely be fine (ex: I transcoded an entire TV show & it initially worked fine. When the error started happening, I was somewhere in the middle of that). So that sounds like more of a bad software update (in some capacity, be it GPU drivers or PMS); I do keep my system up-to-date.
To me as a layperson, it seems like Plex’s transcoding is going wrong somewhere, and it’s saving that bad state to persistent storage (I assume there is some transcoder cache somewhere?)
You don’t have DEBUG logging enabled so there isn’t much in your logs to indicate the problem. Please enable that setting in your server, recreate the problem, grab new logs.
Apologies, here are the logs with debug logging enabled:
Plex Media Server Logs_2026-09-22_22-44-41.zip (41.2 KB)
L1399 of “Plex Media Server.log” seems interesting:
Sep 22, 2026 22:44:30.504 [140213196483384] ERROR - Couldn't find the file to stream: /var/lib/plex/Plex Media Server/Cache/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-6ekaed9i8u3oiwkgplyokkwa-40a7a16b-9309-4c93-a2c2-b9263ae2dcc1/init-stream1.m4s,/var/lib/plex/Plex Media Server/Cache/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-6ekaed9i8u3oiwkgplyokkwa-40a7a16b-9309-4c93-a2c2-b9263ae2dcc1/chunk-stream1-00285.m4s
