Video playing mess-up since 1.23.2.4625-a83d2d0f9

Plex Media Server
1

Happens on every device / server / OS since the update to server version plexmediaserver-1.23.2.4625-a83d2d0f9. The update to that one messed up the playback, often getting the error “Not enough CPU power to play this file” when the player should auto advance from one episode to the other, or one movie to the other, no matter the quality, even if the CPU usage is under 1%. After the update to plexmediaserver-1.23.2.4656-85f0adf5b, the player doesn’t advance automatically to the next episode / movie. It freezes, shows the error message “Unable to start fast enough playback”, but it starts perfectly fine if I tap Back, then play.

I’m using Plex Media Server on a CentOS 7 server, on a dual Opteron hexa-core processors, 32 GB ECC RAM and 2 SSDs (1 TB and 4 TB). If someone tells me that’s not enough of a machine to run even a 4K HDR movie at 50 mbps, then I’m waiting to see what the perfect hardware configuration should be for a server to stream 4K movies on Plex. On version plexmediaserver-1.23.1.4571-6119e8eed everything works fine, except the 4K movie playback that needs to buffer every 20-30 seconds, playing on a 1Gbps LAN. I guess Plex guys mess up things instead of fixing them. Way to go, guys… why do we even pay for Plex Pass?

As players I use Plex for Vidaa, Plex for iOS, Plex on Android, Plex MediaPlayer on PC… Browser support is ok on auto advancing from video to video… but not on playing 4K.

2

Log files please (the ZIP file) which captures this so I can see what’s happening?
Also please include the XML of the file being played which is captured by the logs (use </> code formatting please)

(sorry, can’t diagnose from a description)

3

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-06-08_15-16-55.zip (3.5 MB)
Attached the logs.

I think the problem should be more then well known, since the 2 updates showed up shortly one after the other… I work in the dev area… I know very well how things work… To be honest, we prefer to release a stable version after some tests, then updates one after the other, messing up things that used to work

4

1407.zip (15.3 KB)
XML attached from the 4K movie

5

Thanks,

I see the error in the logs. Going to ask the team.

6

@dan_oancea

Would you mind recreating the playback failure for the movie you show in the XML ?

your logs contain television series playback. I see audio errors in those files.

Before going too far, I’d like to see what the movie looks like.

7

I attached the XML of the episode that was trying to play when I started getting the error. I’ll install the server on another machine today and when the error shows up again, I’ll update the thread with the logs and XML.
3116.zip (2.2 KB)

8

@dan_oancea

Could you possibly provide me either a sizable sample or access to the

file: The.Big.Bang.Theory.S12E09.720p.HDTV.x264 ?

I chatted with the engineer and the audio should never cause a playback fault or hard failure (except for possible audio blips) but is causing you problems.

We’d like to check the file ourselves and see why it’s happening.

If there is a problem with the file then that’s resolvable.
If there’s a software problem, the file will help us fix it.

9

I installed plexmediaserver-1.23.2.4656-85f0adf5b.x86_64.rpm on a CentOS 8.4 machine. It refuses to auto advance to the next episode in House MD. I got this with episode 18 on season 1. I attached the logs (.zip) and the zip with the XML of the file. I will find a way to upload both files (Big Bang S12E09 and House S01E18) to some server and send you a link to download them.They used to play perfect on plexmediaserver-1.23.1.4571-6119e8eed. On a side note… did you, guys, change any audio codec for the server? Seems weird that it started having problems when updated with rpm -Uvh fom plexmediaserver-1.23.1.4571-6119e8eed to plexmediaserver-1.23.2.4625-a83d2d0f9
3000.zip (2.3 KB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-06-11_01-58-12.zip (3.0 MB)

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@dan_oancea

I don’t know if they were (i am constantly loading different versions )

Here are my current codecs for 1.23.2

[chuck@wien PlexMediaServer]$ cd Library/Plex\ Media\ Server/Codecs
[chuck@wien Codecs]$ ls -la
total 1008
drwxr-xr-x  4 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-06 02:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x 11 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-09 02:43 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 admin administrators      36 2021-04-27 18:53 .device-id
-rw-rw-rw-  1 admin administrators 1008912 2021-06-05 18:57 EasyAudioEncoder-1367-linux-x86_64.zip
drwxr-xr-x  3 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-06 02:08 EasyAudioEncoder-1431-linux-x86_64/
drwxr-xr-x  2 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-03 11:37 fa235d6-3858-linux-x86_64/
[chuck@wien Codecs]$ ls -la fa235d6-3858-linux-x86_64/
total 9500
drwxr-xr-x 2 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-03 11:37 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 admin administrators    4096 2021-06-06 02:08 ../
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  274312 2021-05-18 19:39 libaac_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  198136 2021-05-18 19:39 libaac_encoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  144056 2021-05-18 19:39 libac3_decoder.so
-rw-rw-rw- 1 admin administrators  110368 2021-06-03 11:37 libamrnb_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  302224 2021-05-18 19:39 libdca_decoder.so
-rw-rw-rw- 1 admin administrators  739600 2021-06-03 11:37 libh263_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators 1639928 2021-05-18 19:39 libh264_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators 1520760 2021-05-18 19:39 libhevc_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  130224 2021-05-18 19:39 libmp3_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  496592 2021-05-18 19:39 libmpeg1video_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  642632 2021-05-18 19:39 libmpeg2video_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  865280 2021-05-18 19:39 libmpeg4_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  630200 2021-05-18 19:39 libmsmpeg4v2_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators  630200 2021-05-18 19:39 libmsmpeg4v3_decoder.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin administrators 1230488 2021-05-18 19:39 libvc1_decoder.so
-rw-rw-rw- 1 admin administrators  136496 2021-06-03 01:34 libwmav2_decoder.so
[chuck@wien Codecs]$
11

Maybe there’s a problem with a new codec version… It happened before that LAME messed things up… The problem you noticed in teh logs is on decoding, or on encoding? Maybe a rollback to the audio codecs used on 1.23.1.4571 would be a sollution for a temporary update, until the guys releasing the codecs get enough feedback about this problem that they fix it. Just a thought

12

Taking blind stabs at codecs isn’t going to help.
We really should do this the right way and get definitive results the first time.

I am thinking, if you can carve off a 20MB sample of each file , would that be easier ? (dd if=file.ext of=sample.file.ext bs=1M count=20)

13

I added both episodes on WeTransfer. It’s easier not to temper with them by removing any information when cutting them. Link here

14

I have them – Thank you!

15

Dan,

I checked with the Engineer.

Those messages are normal for tuner-captured audio.

There was an actual bug in FFMPEG 4 years ago where it glitched the audio.
Now, even though it still prints the message, the audio glitching has been fixed.
The error persists to let you know the audio stream wasn’t 100% perfect.

I counted 12 of them in the pair of files. Did I miss anything?

What’s left ?

If the remaining is playing transcoding the 4K movie , in hardware, on the i3-3220,

It will not happen. The i3-3xxx family predates 4K hardware and even further predates HEVC or HEVC HDR (common in movies today)

Ref: Intel Core i33220 Processor 3M Cache 3.30 GHz Product Specifications

16

But what’s with the auto advancing on the tv shows? I mean… the episodes aren’t 4K… they’re, at best, 720p, yet it just gets stuck when advancing, then shows error “Couldn’t open fast enough”

17

Dan,

Is there any way you can show me this “couldn’t open fast enough” error?

I don’t ever see that.

I don’t know if it’s the player complaining it’s not getting data fast enough or the server not being able to start playback fast enough

18

I’m currently on 1.23.1.4571-6119e8eed and it works. I think I’ll update it on the next release. I lost my patience with it. The error stands with the server being unable to start playback fast enough.

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