I recently had an error plague me with my plex server.
Suddenly my main plex server lost the ability to play files with EAC3 audio.
(Running plex in docker-compose with 'plexinc/pms-docker' image)
It wasn't very apparent from the start that the symptoms was related to the audio part. The files played without problems on my test server and on other player like VLC.
Today I finally took the time to dig deeper into this.
In the logs I had these lines repeating when I tried to play media with EAC3:
[Transcoder] [eac3_eae @ 0x262c9c0] EAE timeout! EAE not running, or wrong folder? Could not read '/tmp/pms-01e12e12-968e-4047-acf4-2b19b99bccca/EasyAudioEncoder/Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)/bxia1zmddlkmq97170puzgdw_382-0-23.wav'And in the docker/console log:
Dolby, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and the double D symbol are trademarks of Dolby Laboratories.When searching the web I found articles from 2017, that felt a bit discomforting, since a problem like this should be fixed by now if it was a common problem...
I tested a lot of things without effect, to name a few:
- Deleting the 'Codec' folder and restarting plex.
(Making plex download the Codec it needed again) - Running a very old plex version.
- Rerouting /transcode and /tmp.
Then I gave up and restarted the whole server, and things started working again.
Digger deeper I found this gem of an forum post. Here one user reports his problem being solved by increasing 'inotify' limits. I had some thoughts about that I've reached some limit, but was looking more towards limit on open files and I was far from it. Running quite a lot of different containers (including GitLab).
I've now increased the limit from 8192 that is default to 524288.
(Using commands described here)
The reboot fixed the problem without a doubt, let's hope the increase in 'inotify' limit helped to fix it permanently.