Playback crashes near the top of every hour?

invisibleandre87

Hi all, looking for some help with a strange issue - I have ErsatzTV and Plex running in containers on the same Ubuntu server. This has been mostly working great - I have hardware acceleration set up and generally have no major issues with playback/switching channels/etc.

What's odd is that near the top of every hour (for example, 7:02) whatever is playing will stop - occasionally it will be able to pick back up but usually it will completely crash back to the Plex Live TV guide. Usually there is an accompanying "weak signal" message but of course the containers are talking to each other over LAN.

I've done some poking around in the logs (with everything set to Debug) and nothing is jumping out at me - I have the library refresh set every six hours so I imagine that that can't be it. I don't notice any CPU or memory spikes while this is happening so I'm not thinking there is a resource issue.

Here are some additional details:

ErsatzTV version: 25.1.0-eca62e8b-docker-vaapi
Plex version: 1.41.3.9314
Host server is a Beelink S12 Mini Pro with an N100, running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
ErsatzTV library is configured as a Plex Media Source
Hardware acceleration set up with Vaapi/iHD/drm as the options

Any help would be appreciated!

jason

When ETV streams from a Plex Media Source, it acts like a download from Plex. Is it possible that you have something (Tautulli?) terminating downloads from Plex?

If Plex and ETV are on the same system, I would give ETV the exact same media mounts as Plex. If you do this, and scan the libraries once more, ETV should stream from disk instead of downloading from Plex, which might eliminate this issue.

invisibleandre87

Thanks for the suggestions! I will see if that media mount change helps - it appears to be working based on the ffmpeg CLI that I see in the ErsatzTV logs, but is there a way to tell for sure?

I made the change twenty minutes or so prior to the top of the hour and the issue still happened, but now I have changed my channel mode to HLS Direct to see if that helps. I looked at the Plex logs this time and it looked like it was starting a fresh transcode session at the same time the issue was happening so trying to avoid transcoding altogether.