I successfully managed to convert my Plex server to unraid and am very happy. Performance is excellent.

 

I have a really weird situation that I have been struggling with for a few days (I like to do my research before I ask for help). 

I have an HD Homerun setup and can view live TV through my server. However, I am unable to record via the DVR. After I setup the HD Homerun and configured the channels, I when through and setup to record shows.  I took the top level directory approach with Plex so my share is at the /usr/mnt level, allowing me to point to multiple directories. I have a share called downloads and can point to it from Plex. The share is set to pubic. 

 

My first attempts to record shows had an unusual result:  The show name, season successfully created folders, but when I went into the folder, I had upwards of 200 to over 1000 zero byte files... showname(1), showname(2), showname(3), etc.. Longer shows had more zero byte files. Plex reported that there was not enough free disk space to start the recording. I have 42TB capacity with only 21TB actually used, and the 2 disks that are setup for this share have 31% and 2% utilization. There is space. 

 

I had them set to prefer cache and changed that to no. with no change in results. 

 

I cleared everything out and set a different directory for recording (as a troubleshooting measure) and started to record a single show. I went into MC and noticed that the showname folder had been created, and then a Season subfolder, and a zero byte file with the episode name.  The timestamp by MC was 8am when it was 10am. (just an observation). Anyway, It appeared to be recording, but when the show ended, the zero byte file remained. Attempting to record the subsequent show yields the "not enough space message" and NO FOLDERS WERE created. A real head scratcher  - nothing is being written to the Plex log for the container. 

 

Plex is working flawlessly otherwise.  I would appreciate any guidance on what to try next.. 

 

 

53 minutes ago, ChefSpanky said:

Plex is working flawlessly otherwise.  I would appreciate any guidance on what to try next.. 

One possible cause of the problem; transcoding space.  Where is your Plex instance set to transcode? 

 

HDHomeRun/Plex transcodes while recording and this process can take up to 16GB per hour of recorded material.  If your transcode location is low on space, it will cause recording issues.  HDHomeRun takes a lot of space to create temporary files so you can watch a program while it is recording and also scrub the timeline.  Personally, I never watch a program while it is recording but it will not clean up after itself until the program finishes recording or until forced to reclaim previously used space by limitations set on the transcode location.

 

I transcode to RAM and limit it to 16GB (many set it to as little as 4GB)  You may have plenty of space in the destination shares but may have a problem with space where it is trying to transcode.

Edited May 13, 20233 yr by Hoopster

Thanks for the tips - I think I am closer now. I reconfigured plex to use a tmp folder for transcoding in the array - previously it was on my NVME - even though it had 990GB free, as soon as I set the temp to a different directory it actually showed it recording, But not at the end of the show it says "Could not move recorded media to destination".  The folder that I have set is where my TV Shows reside and the share is set to pubic.

 

I would be interested in how you can use RAM to do the session captures - I have 32GB in the server and barely use any ram with Unraid

 

PROGRESS! :) 

16 minutes ago, ChefSpanky said:

I would be interested in how you can use RAM to do the session captures

I have this in my go file in the config folder on the Unraid flash drive:

 

mkdir /tmp/PlexRamScratch
chmod -R 777 /tmp/PlexRamScratch
mount -t tmpfs -o size=16g tmpfs /tmp/PlexRamScratch

 

It creates a PlexRamScratch folder in /tmp which is in RAM.  It is limited to 16GB in size.  You could make it smaller.  I have 64GB RAM on my server so 16GB is not a big deal.

 

Then in the Plex docker container /trancode (container path) is set to /tmp/PlexRamScratch (host path).

 

 

Of course, in Plex, the transcode location is /transcode

Were you ever able to figure out what this issue was? I have a tempfs RAM disk mounted to my Plex container for transcoding, it's 80GB in size so I can't imagine I'm running out of space there. My library directories are all confirmed writable by Plex, as I can touch files from within the container.