What is going on with Plex lately??

I just updated my Plex server application on my QNAP NAS to version 1.4.3.3433 and I can’t even load into my server now. Just before installing this update, I was able to load in just fine. It’s just a spinning loading wheel and never loads in.

On top of that, recently I have had to hold my breathe whether or not I was going to be able to access my Plex media from outside of my network. I have set up port forwarding previously and I haven’t been able to connect outside of my network recently. (with an iPhone 6)

And lastly, when playing music files inside my network, when I cast from my iPhone 6 to my iPad pro, about every 5th song just never loads (just has a never ending loading wheel)

ALL of these issues have seemed to have started recently. I am a lifetime Plex Pass owner and I am VERY disappointed with the performance of Plex lately. I can’t rely on it as I should be able to! Anyone else experiencing any of these things too??

I’ve been having a fair number of crashes since going to 1.4.2.3400. My wife keeps calling me at work to say Plex is down again. I’m hoping a future update will fix it.

LMAO, man I have to do that every morning and get the same calls from the wife, otherwise. My culprit is the scheduled task of the media scanner at 2 AM causes it to happen everyday.

Had my first crash with 1.4.3.3433 tonight during Maintainance. Nothing in the logs, PMS just stop responding. Had to force close from task manager. Nothing in the windows event logs either. Downgraded to 1.3.3.3148 as I’m in a hurry to catch a plane.

^^Same here on Mac.

@trumpy81 said:
System crashes especially during maintenance fall in two places, files that do not belong in your media folders and are of no use to Plex and damaged/poorly encoded files.

Rename your files using FileBot and organise your files according to the Plex File Naming guidelines.

See this page for the Plex Media preparation guidelines: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/categories/200028098-Media-Preparation

FileBot:
https://www.filebot.net

Plex naming schemes for FileBot:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/191687/plex-naming-schemes-for-filebot/p1

To check for damaged/poor encoded files you should monitor your Plex logs, especially the Plex Scanner.log, Plex Media Scanner Analysis.log and Plex Media Scanner Deep Analysis.log

When you locate a damaged/poorly encoded file the best option is to replace the file with a known good file or you may be able to re-encode the file using Handbrake (free for PC/Mac) or any similar software.

The preferred format to use is MP4 H.264/AAC or AVC/AAC as this is the most compatible format across the most devices.

If you do not follow the above instructions you will continue to have issues with Plex and you will continue to waste your computers resources, such as RAM and CPU time.

I don’t know if our file management / broken files is the problem. I have spent the last year cleaning up all of my files and every file plays correctly. I just started to receive a daily crash at around 4:30am with the latest Beta 5 build. I have my maintenance tasks setup daily at 3am - 5am and at roughly 4:30am Plex stalls. Coincidentally, I caught Plex stalled when both the EPG was stuck at 35% while also trying to scan and clean up my media libraries. I think Plex gets stuck while both are processing. Everything was peachy and scanning correctly BEFORE the latests release.

I have done the same. My library has been maticulously perfected when it comes to file naming and organization. It hasn’t been until recently that all these issues have started to happen.

Sorry, can the programmers not foresee broken media files and not let a critical part of the server system CRASH?!

When you locate a damaged/poorly encoded file the best option is

… What if I detect poorly programmed pieces of server/service code?

@trumpy81 I regularly read about this renaming/damaged file nonsense.

I usually do not read “oh, yes… replacing that one file got that fixed” messages.
I call this “urban legend”. It is usually buggy code, not poorly named files.

I’m all for taking blame IF I was the one who made an error but if me and plenty of us users who have now gotten very meticulous about how we arrange and manage our media files, you bet your a$$ I made sure to follow Plex’s guidelines. What I hate when its turned on us is that I named my tv shows as shown in the guidelines and then the DVR with Grace Note decides to name the files and folders with no matching, creating a mess for us who now have two or three folders of unnecessary folder structures and files names with improper metadata. Not all of us are dummies or noobs and Its sad when I have to defend Plex in front of a noob who says something like “Why can’t Plex import files with any naming structure” and I think of saying because they have guidelines that we must follow. When Plex doesn’t follow their own structure and suggests its my fault, then I get annoyed as ****. I know its a Beta so I bite my tongue and deal with it but I try not to be harsh most of the time for the sake of letting the devs do their job… just not consistent in every release.

How do I know its NOT my files damaged? Because this morning I DID NOT have to restart Plex at all after it did its maintenance routine. How does Plex scan one morning and decides to crash with the need for a manual force quit and restart then another morning work perfectly fine, with me not having to delete or fix ANY or my files?

In almost all file systems, a media file can break. Without warning. Without anybody’s fault. Period.

If the PMS scanner crashes each time it encounters such a file, I call it poorly coded. Error handling should be an important part of a software which touches and analyzes thousands of files.

Maintaining your files is an important task that everybody should be aware of… Plex, for example, could log those files and tell the user about it in its log which is available via UI.

That would be a clear help for everybody. Crashing server services are not helping anybody.

Again, people are telling YOU that this is not the cause of their problems in this very thread. Just keep ignoring this and go on lecturing people that it is all their fault.

Very funny

I’ve had the same problem. Except I’m running 2 versions of Plex (plex-pass and Harware beta). The plex-pass version was crashing each night. I setup a 3rd server running the previous version and it does not crash nor does the HW version. Only the latest plex-pass version.

All three servers are pointed to the same file structures. It’s definitely in the latest plex pass version.

I haven’t looked to be honest. I just set this 3rd machine up last night to test with. It’s there purely to test scanner and maint to see if there are any crashes. I’ll paly/check to see if I can come up with anything useful.

Carlo

Same problem here (started with this version) , and I notice when I restart plex it does a scan of my media and says “found an item” a lot. not sure why

@trumpy81 said:
Can you provide your logs please, go to Plex settings->server->help and click on download logs. Then attach the zip file to your post, thanks.

You talkin to me? Will do as soon as SE michigan has power again :slight_smile: … which might not be for several days … Michigan power outage so large other states lend a hand

I am having an issue too. The auto update failed and i had to manually install the setup binaries. Since the update, the dashboard no longer loads, and other misc crashes. I have to keep ending the process and restarting Plex. I am running the server on an HP DL380G6 rack mount server running 2012R2. Ran great for years and suddenly this install has been a pain… I can pass any logs along.

Yeah, the logs on mine always just ends as well with no more error info and there is no crash report either.

Also, if it were simply badly named files or badly encoded files then it would affect all servers hitting the same content, not just one of them and I have 8 of them for testing this very issue and as backup. Besides the scanner is a completely external process called via command line, why would it crash the main server? It’s a little odd to say the least. I could see the scanner crashing out.

@trumpy81 said:
Thanks Carlo, if you find anything then please supply your logs and we’ll look into it for you.

@chrisallen has been looking into the crash dumps I supplied him. it’s a definite bug and has been there since 1.4.1.

“System crashes especially during maintenance fall in two places, files that do not belong in your media folders and are of no use to Plex and damaged/poorly encoded files.”

I was replying this. Assuming you were talking to me since it was right after my post. I was just pointing out that it doesn’t have anything to do with file naming or encoding or the media scanner since that is the only thing that deals the analysis of both of those and isn’t what is crashing.

For me it’s the main server that is crashing, but it is a guaranteed thing that happens during the schedule task. I will look again, but the last time I checked the logs just stopped when the application died, but I will send what I have and see if you can find anything else I might be overlooking. Like I said, I have 7 other servers spread over different OSes and it’s only this oldest instance that has this issue. I have also recreated the database before as well so it isn’t a corruption issue there as well.

Thanks,

Chad

So, we are at the point that logs are needed and we know that software crashes.
Since software generally does not need to crash (no matter for what reason) it would have been best practice to ask for logs from the beginning:

“Oh, your scanner crashes? Might be related to some weird file structure problem we did not expect could happen. Could you please provide logs so that we can tell you what happened and that we can code a more perfect error handling. And you never know, it might even be a software bug which shows up only under certain conditions. Would be happy to read your logs.”

Now, reread what you told those guys instead, in short: RTFM and make sure it is not your fault. Otherwise, everybody would be affected.

Last words from my side. You will - unfortunately - not change your attitude. Thank you for accepting the possibility of a software bug if a software component crashes - even if it would affects only a single user (which it is not). Hope that These guys can be helped. BTW, my Win PMS scanner also crashes once a week during the night, my QNAP PMS scanner did not for a while.