Unable to update libraries with new media

General Discussions
1

Hi all, I realized tonight that newly added media hasn’t been showing up in Plex for the past ~7 days or so. Media plays as expected, but new media doesn’t show up when scanned.

I did the usual first steps to troubleshoot:

  • Restart PMS service, rescan libraries. No good.
  • Restart server, rescan libraries. No good.
  • Log out of PMS, log back in, rescan. No good.
  • Double-check scan directories.
  • Remove a file manually, re-add it, rescan libraries. No good.

I enabled debug and verbose logging and found that the new files are all triggering similar errors:
Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.233 [10300] DEBUG - * Scanning The Good Place Season 2 Episode 11

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.233 [10300] DEBUG - Looking for path match for [D:\Video\TV\The Good Place\Season 2\The.Good.Place.S02E11.iNTERNAL.720p.HEVC.x265-MeGusta.mkv]

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.233 [10300] DEBUG - Skipping hash check, no size match for 154237606 bytes.

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.233 [10300] DEBUG - No match for hash.

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.234 [10300] DEBUG - Checking descendants of The Good Place

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.234 [10300] DEBUG - -> Searching down into The Good Place/Season 2

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.234 [10300] DEBUG - Checking descendants of The Good Place/Season 2

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.235 [10300] DEBUG - -> FOUND metadata item (show)

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.235 [10300] DEBUG - -> We found a local media item with rooted metadata in The Good Place/Season 2

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.235 [10300] DEBUG - Found existing show 32787

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.236 [10300] DEBUG - Downloading document http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/changestamp

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.236 [10300] DEBUG - HTTP requesting GET http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/changestamp

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.237 [10300] DEBUG - HTTP 401 response from GET http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/changestamp

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.237 [10300] ERROR - PlexClient::downloadContainer: expected MediaContainer element, found html

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.238 [10300] ERROR - Exception inside transaction (inside=1) (..\Library\Episode.cpp:187): Unable to allocate a changestamp from the server

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.238 [10300] ERROR - Exception inside transaction (inside=1) (..\Library\MetadataItem.cpp:2903): Unable to allocate a changestamp from the server

Feb 02, 2018 20:36:08.238 [10300] ERROR - Exception assimilating media item in The Good Place\Season 2: Unable to allocate a changestamp from the server

Searched Plex forums and found a number of similar problems, but none of the suggested fixes resolved my issue or seemed to be applicable based on OS.

  • Verified that secure connections was set to preferred, not required.
  • Verified firewall holes in place (and even dropped firewall completely to no avail)
  • Verified that I was able to access 127.0.0.1:32400. **However ** I get an “unauthorized” error on http://127.0.0.1:32400/library and on library/changestamp

I’m running Windows 10 Pro, PMS version 1.10.1.4602, and am not aware of any updates (Plex or otherwise) going through in the past week that might have caused the behavior.

Any help that could be provided would be very appreciated. Thanks!

2

I am having this same issue. Was hoping I was not the only one.

3

@ats0001 said:
I am having this same issue. Was hoping I was not the only one.

Just so you’re aware, I re-asked this question here. I didn’t want to annoy folks, but since it was asked on a Friday night I’m guessing there was just not many folks around until it got buried later.

4

There is some info here suggesting it is a DNS issue. https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/174778/unable-to-allocate-a-changestamp-from-the-server

it is possible to get entire log. ( please turn off verbose)

5

@BigWheel said:
There is some info here suggesting it is a DNS issue. https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/174778/unable-to-allocate-a-changestamp-from-the-server

it is possible to get entire log. ( please turn off verbose)

Definitely, thanks for the assistance! Verbose is off and logs are freshly generated.

Full disclosure, in between cycles today at work I’ve been troubleshooting and have tried upgrading versions (my PMS settings didn’t detect a new version, but when I went out to the site I found a new one. I was previously at 1.10.1.4602, but am now at 1.11.1.4760 and the problem still exists.

I also tried a repair, thinking it might reset permissions to files or directories, but it’s still not updating files.

6

@inebriates said:

@BigWheel said:
There is some info here suggesting it is a DNS issue. https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/174778/unable-to-allocate-a-changestamp-from-the-server

it is possible to get entire log. ( please turn off verbose)

Definitely, thanks for the assistance! Verbose is off and logs are freshly generated.

Full disclosure, in between cycles today at work I’ve been troubleshooting and have tried upgrading versions (my PMS settings didn’t detect a new version, but when I went out to the site I found a new one. I was previously at 1.10.1.4602, but am now at 1.11.1.4760 and the problem still exists.

I also tried a repair, thinking it might reset permissions to files or directories, but it’s still not updating files.

Thanks for the logs zip. Very informative

We need to sort an issue with your Plex Media Server environment before looking into any problems

It appears that you have multiple instances of Plex Media Server.exe running - one as a process in a user account (normal way of running Plex Media Server) and one overlapping and running as a scheduled task or windows service.

The logs clearly show that and also show that there is a problem with getting the security certificate from plex.tv - that could be because of the machine identifier or multiple instances.

The multiple processes would be locking each other out and leading to indeterminate errors

If you want to run Plex Media Server.exe as a service - you must make sure that the registry entry for the windows account you used to install it under does not have an entry to auto launch it on login/reboot

If you use the cjmurph PMS As a Service wrapper available here http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/93994/pms-as-a-service/p1 and you run the service in the same windows account as the one you use to install Plex Media Server then It should take care of that. Alternatively after every install / update, edit the registry to delete this registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Plex Media Server

If you have been having multiple processes running without realizing then I would not trust your installed software and I would suggest you do a repair / re-install after making sure all Plex Media Server processes are shutdown

With this out of the way, then any other issues you have can be investigated

7

Interesting! You’re 100% right, that’s remnants from years ago when I was troubleshooting a problem where PMS would crash and my wife wouldn’t be able to access media until I made it home to troubleshoot. I wrote up a crappy script to run PMS at startup and then if it wasn’t running try again every 15 minutes. But since it was running as a service and as the executable that gave me two instances running. That should be resolved now.

I disabled my crap script, bounced the server, and after things came up I loaded the web console to find that it said there’s an unclaimed server on my network, click here to claim it now.

8

I think we’re cooking now, thanks for the insight into the logs. I wasn’t even troubleshooting in the right area, thanks for the perspective.

Once I claimed the unclaimed server, the media started getting processed and showed up in my recently added TV and movies.

Now, however, I see two instances of my server listed. One with a capital letter and the other without.

I can resolve that by just going to Settings>Devices>Server and then deleting the lower-case server right?

uzllnrmdhr52.png1075×255 166 KB

9

Yes - just remove the older duplicate server

10

@inebriates said:

@ats0001 said:
I am having this same issue. Was hoping I was not the only one.

Just so you’re aware, I re-asked this question here. I didn’t want to annoy folks, but since it was asked on a Friday night I’m guessing there was just not many folks around until it got buried later.

Thanks for the update. As it tends to happen in my experience with Plex, the problem resolved itself after about a week for me with no action on my part.

It is incredibly frustrating.