plexinc/roku-client-public — Issue #24: Media fails to play when using server hostname
Author: stormerider
Created: 2012-02-08 05:26:33+00:00
State: open

We've recently seen a number of threads on the forums where people are having trouble playing media. If they remove the server (which is a hostname) from the preferences and add the server back via the IP address, they are able to play media fine.

I experienced this myself when I switched from my Roku 2 back to my Roku 1. I checked and the Roku was talking to the PMS fine, able to browse the sections with no problem. However, it got an unknown error when dealing with playing the media. Looking into the logs I found that PMS threw a transcoding error, that it was unable to retrieve the file from http://storm:32400/library/parts/23456/file.mp4. Digging in further, I found that the URL worked fine in links, which confused me. I checked in Chrome, it worked fine.

Since I figured it might be DNS related, I pinged storm from storm and got an IPV6 address. Looking at netstat, it looks like Plex just binds to 0.0.0.0:32400, which is IPV4 only, which I think is the problem. I don't see Plex binding to [::]:32400 as well. I might be on the wrong track as to why the transcoder couldn't reach the file, but that's the only thing I saw in the logs.

I'll try to re-duplicate this to get a log to attach.