I recently bought a new Sony 55inch TV, it runs on the latest version of Android TV. I was excited about getting to use the proper version of the plex client. My old TV was a samsung tv and I had the Plex client that wasn’t the official one (although it worked just fine).
What I’ve found is that things I record off the TV won’t play back by default, it will just sit there with the spinner. I have to go into the settings and tell it to use 8Mbps, then it will work. I have the same issue on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge with the latest firmware and plex client).
This is pretty disappointing and it seems that it has been an issue for quite sometime (it’s happened on my android phone since I first got Plex DVR a few months back.
All other videos I have on plex playback just fine, I don’t have to make any manual adjustments.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue and/or is it a known issue (I did search before posting but was unable to find the exact same issue).
Yes I am. I have a Philips Android 55 inch I find it happens with the HD stuff. I have to convert and then it works. The reason it says for transcoding is that the file format can’t be played. The audio is also out of sync. SD seems to work ok though.
I’ll have to confirm if mine only impacts the HD channels. I’ll do some testing tonight and report back. My audio is in sync though. Also I think when you have to chose to convert it it will have to transcode, I guess the reason at that point doesn’t really matter. The problem is why does it fail to play in the first place - frustrating!
My advice would be to give up your quest of having any native Plex app on a smart TV work well. I basically purchased an Nvidia Shield for this very reason, because the LG TV Plex app was essentially abandonware, having received no new updates in over a year.
User #s drive adoption and development on a huge multi platform product like this. I saw the writing on the wall and went with something that had stronger backing.
How are you finding the Nvidia Shield? Does it happily play back your recorded content? I did do some research on the Nvidia Shield but am not ready to purchase one just yet.
I would have thought that as they both run Android TV the Plex client will be exactly the same? I guess there could be more to it than that though (codecs supported by the system perhaps).
It plays back everything I have flawlessly without transcoding most of the time because they actually paid attention to formats and codecs natively accelerated by the device. Most of everything I have is H264 and HEVC.
I haven’t seen it on another Android device so I can’t speak to whether or not it would look similar across platform, but I assume so. I had an LG TV and that runs WebOS , so … zero cross platform action going on there. I actually think it was just a front end for Plex Web in the device profile, to be honest.
The Shield is badass for several reasons. It’s got good first party app support from all the major streaming outlets, it runs Plex (I just run the client, not the server - I have a PC for that) , it runs Kodi, tons of other stuff… I haven’t dipped into the games or the game streaming but being able to stream games from a PC is pretty cool, too.
I found that if i turn on the “Convert video while recording” option under my tuner Device Settings (cog icon) that my recorded tv will now play the original quality without any issue. It still seems to be transcoding both the video and the audio, but at least it’s working!
I find the same even with the Shield. It can handle live tv ok but when I try to play recordings it will freeze on the first frame and only play audio. Have to force transcoding by going down 1 step in quality and then it plays ok.
