Reliability of plex on nvidia shield TV

by kingviper

Lately, it seems like Plex has more and more issues playing media on my nVidia Shield. Certain movies and tv that play fine on my phone (android), roku, Mi Box, and web browser will not play on my Shield. It's not all media, but it is always the same media. I haven't started to dig into it the commonality, but has anyone else seen this? If I install Kodi with the Plex plugin, the same videos will play just fine. I find it surprising I have so many issues given how closely the plex devs worked with nvidia to get the server working on the shield; I would expect playback to be a breeze.

Update: After using ExportTools to export all of the codec information about all of my media, I was able to narrow down playback issues to any media with EAC3 audio. With that information, I was able to identify a resolution which was to delete the Codecs folder in my plex application path on the plex server itself. Upon restart, all of my EAC3 media is now playing without issue! Thanks for all the suggestions from everyone.

Izacus

Plex player was always horribly broken and unreliable for me - both on Sony Bravia and ShieldTV. Just too much issues with resolution switching, audio passthrough and others.

Kodi + Plex plugin with resolution switching enabled is the sweet spot right now.

aonysllo

I have never had a single issue like you describe, and I have been using Plex on the shield for a long time, way back when the original was first released with Plex. Are you also running the server on the shield? I haven't tried that.

I'd be interested to know what files it's having issues with and I'd love to try it and see.

ISaidGoodDey

My shield plex server will consistently crash after a day or two of running, requiring a reboot of the device. Annoying if I'm not around to reboot it and want to use it.

Sorry its unrelated just had to say it.

ifixpedals

It's possible that the Plex server is transcoding to these other network devices. The transcoded file is probably more friendly to a variety of players, while the player on the Sheild is playing the non-transcoded file. If those files were downloaded from the internet (like many of mine are) then there's no real way to know how well they were originally encoded. Try this: Go into plex server and generate "Optimized versions" of the files. Then try playing them. If you experience no more issues, then bad file encoding is likely the problem.

sk9592

Any chance is it media using a particular codec or subtitle format that the native Plex app is having trouble with?

HEVC/H.265 perhaps?

OutFr0mUndr

I run the server on my shield TV and serve the files from an Odroid HC-2 (similar to a Pi) with OMV. Been working flawlessly for a long time. I also record OTA with the Shield & HDHomeRun to the HC-2 with no issue.

If I want to watch OTA on my phone out of the house, I feel like the Shield does a better job converting mpeg2 to h264 than my PC.

pawdog

The only movie I have had any issues with playback was a Black Panther 4k Remux and the issue was caused by a particular subtitle. This was after I noticed I wasn't getting the subtitles and enabled them. The default subtitle file caused issues with playback. Choosing a different one fixed that. Otherwise I have never had any issues with Plex playback on the Shield.

venomo160

Do you use Shield as the plex server? If yes, how did you remove the codec folder?