Cannot read property 'pause' of null

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

When trying to play back a live channel with TV Everywhere I get the following error.

Cannot read property 'pause' of null

[email protected]/es5/tech/html5.js:1663
[email protected]/es5/player.js:1684
techCall_@video.js/es5/player.js:1763
pause@components/VideoPlayer.js:169
stop@components/VideoPlayer.js:75
apply@create-react-class/factory.js:664
componentWillUnmount@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:209
b@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:214
Ki@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:221
Mi@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:253

I have tried with multiple channels and I get the same thing, though the text slightly varies - likely because it is trying a different channel.
I have tried updating to the most recent build of Channels server (2021.05.31.1921) and I still get the error.
I rescanned my channels and it was able to scan them, so I think I can safely assume it is not a credential problem.

The server is a TrueNAS box running the unofficial Channels plug-in. It has been working fine for about a week, but started having trouble this morning. I have issues on the web client, the iOS client, and the Fire Cube client.

#2

Can you try with the prerelease

#3

Just updated to pre-release
2021.05.31.2003 and received the following error.

Cannot read property 'pause' of null

[email protected]/es5/tech/html5.js:1663
[email protected]/es5/player.js:1684
techCall_@video.js/es5/player.js:1763
pause@components/VideoPlayer.js:169
stop@components/VideoPlayer.js:75
apply@create-react-class/factory.js:664
componentWillUnmount@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:209
b@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:214
Ki@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:221
Mi@react-dom/cjs/react-dom.production.min.js:253

#4

RESOLVED:
tl;dr It was permissions.

:man_facepalming: Turns out I shot myself in the foot on this one. I have been doing some overhauling on my servers and to make Plex happy I did a chown -R on my whole media directory which included the directory where Channels DVR saves to. When I actually checked the log I saw messages like this:
2021/05/31 19:04:36.111783 [ERR] Could not create backup: mkdir /mnt/DVR/Database/backup-20210531.190436: permission denied

If you are running Channels DVR via TrueNAS/FreeNAS then this next part may have tips for you
Realizing that I tripped myself up again, I logged into the shell of the Jail running Channels and went to the mount point. For the community-supported plug-in the user that runs the service is named dvr. Once I knew that I did a chown -R dvr <path/to/dvr/directory> on the Channels directory only. In my case it looked like this:
chown -R dvr:dvr /mnt/DVR (in Linux-speak dvr:dvr means "change the owner to the user dvr and the group owner to the group named dvr". I didn't need to define the group to make this work, but I chose to anyway.)
Note: TrueNAS jails automatically log you in as root so there is no need to use sudo for your commands.

I hope this helps someone in the future.