I've never had an issue with Plex until the past few weeks, it seems as though myself and some users are unable to access content locally or remotely.  It's not all my users, it's not specific files and it seems to be independent of video codec or resolution.  To make matters worse, I sent a friend one of the files giving me trouble, had him host it on his Plex server and I instantly connected and had access.  It seems that this may be an OS issue, or potentially with my share, yet I haven't been able to find the smoking gun in the logs indicating what's going on here.  I'm attaching my diagnostic below and should note that the system had a hard power-off a few days ago due to a power outage in my neighborhood.  The APC was purchased immediately thereafter and is installed now...but it wasn't then, hence the issue.  Any help would be appreciated.

trescommas-diagnostics-20210401-1858-BeforeReboot.zip

I should elaborate: the problem started with a few movie files in my Movies directory.  The movies were recent releases, and added amongst older films.  The older films, while being sometimes 5-10 times the size of the newer ones, would play flawlessly and without an issue, but it seems anything dated 2021 was giving me problems.  Now, the problem has spread to other films, regardless of their year of release.  I know how strange that sounds, but given the fact that I had 1080p, SD, 4k and 720p versions of these files and none of them were able to stream at all, my only common denominators are that they were released in 2021 and that on the back-end they are all on the same share in Unraid.

Your diagnostics report memory errors. All bets are off until that problem is fixed.

 

That was before a reboot, this is post-reboot.  The memory errors were due to one of the RAM sticks needing to be reseated.

trescommas-diagnostics-20210401-2001.zip

This sounds remarkably similar to what I'm experiencing:

 

https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-wont-play-certain-episodes-no-matter-what-quality-or-type-of-file/210390

25 minutes ago, jackfalveyiv said:

This sounds remarkably similar to what I'm experiencing:

 

With the same result when you refreshed the codecs, or not?

 

You don't say anything about how you're trying to play the files. Is it direct playing, direct streaming or transcoding. If transcoding, is it software or hardware. If hardware, what hardware?

 

Have you looked in the support thread for your particular container? Does it allow you to use a different version of the application, as for example linuxserver.io's does?

I have deleted the codecs but that did not improve the situation.

 

I'm trying to direct play the files in question via Apple TV, iOS, Chrome browser, Roku 4k and Samsung TV apps and they all are unable to play one of the files in question.

 

Transcoding is hardware transcoding using my 3070 GPU, I have the Nvidia Driver installed and the correct parameters inside linuxserver.io's docker instructions.  I saw the errors earlier with the newest build of Plex but have since grabbed the latest stable release.  I have looked inside the support thread for this container and found no one else experiencing this issue yet.

Have you tried an older version of the application? Version 1.21.2.3939 works better for me than anything newer, but then I'm using different hardware for transcoding and a fork of the linuxserver container.

 

31 minutes ago, jackfalveyiv said:

found no one else experiencing this issue yet

 

That makes it look more like something specific to your setup.

 

I've tried the version you suggested (1.21.2.3939) with no change. This morning I'm getting a different error when trying to direct play the file on iOS:

 

"The Plex Media Server can't find or access the media file for this library item at the expected location."

 

Hardware transcoding seems to be working fine as I tested other files and they are transcoding correctly using the GPU.  I checked permissions on this specific file versus other files in the same directory and nothing everything looks correct.  I also looked into the inotify limit and increased that number then rebooted the server, but that has had no effect. 

The error message makes it look as though the file isn't where Plex is expecting to find it. Where exactly is the file on your server? Compare that with where Plex is expecting to find it. Check the container mappings. Something isn't as it should be.

 

As of this morning, the file is playable once again.  The file resides in the correct directory, with the correct permissions, as it did yesterday.  For the time being, I'm going to chalk this up to issues conflated by the bad update pushed yesterday as nothing else makes sense and I was unknowingly troubleshooting things while there was a bad update pushed to the docker.  This still doesn't explain why the error occurred weeks ago, but the amount of contradictory information that I've found makes me want to wait some time before barking up this tree again.  Thanks for the information John.

3 minutes ago, jackfalveyiv said:

the bad update pushed yesterday

 

Ah, ok. I didn't know about that.

Interesting. I've been having issues all of the sudden playing direct playing anything that is EAC3 on my AppleTv. So to get around that I've been using Tdarr to convert things to AC3 which my receiver supports very well. 

 

Sure I'm guessing my AppleTV or Plex has been converting EAC3 to AAC on the fly, but recently it just sits there and does nothing. Lol

 

Maybe it is a Codec thing even on my end too. So are you simply deleting the entire codec folder or specific files? My issues might not be the same as yours too, but I figure since I've stumbled onto this topic I might as well ride the wave some. 

 

I'm using the Official Docker from Plex FYI.

 

 

5 minutes ago, kizer said:

So are you simply deleting the entire codec folder or specific files?

When I has this issue over a year ago, the guidance was to delete the entire codecs folder.  That forces Plex to download again any needed codecs as they are needed.  The EAC3 codecs seem particularly prone to getting messed up.  This completely resolved my Plex audio issues and I have had none since.  YMMV.

You can delete the Codecs folder and it will be re-downloaded. In my case it's at

/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Codecs/

4 minutes ago, John_M said:

You can delete the Codecs folder and it will be re-downloaded. In my case it's at

/mnt/user/appdata/PlexMediaServer/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Codecs/

 

Thanks. I'll copy that folder, delete it and give the plex server a reboot. I figured I could just search the Plex folder. I just didn't want to over delete things and drive the family crazy. lol

7 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

When I has this issue over a year ago, the guidance was to delete the entire codecs folder.  That forces Plex to download again any needed codecs as they are needed.  The EAC3 codecs seem particularly prone to getting messed up.  This completely resolved my Plex audio issues and I have had none since.  YMMV.

 

Thank you. I'll backup the folder and give it a deleting and see if things come back. Sounds like I have some homework tonight.

3 minutes ago, kizer said:

I'll backup the folder

 

Always a wise move!

On 4/2/2021 at 10:17 AM, John_M said:

 

Always a wise move!

 

Deleted the folder and walla. Everything seems just fine.