Latest Apple TV 4K with TvOS 18.3 - All video plays fine for about 40 minutes then it starts fast forwarding but audio stays the same. Tested with and without New Render and with and without New Audio Engine, latest beta build of Plex on Apple TV.
Network settings are default.
As others mentioned, no problem with stable version.
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Were are your logs, it really is the only way to narrow down this issue?
I did send the log file.
Yes-
Custom hosts and self-generated certs.
I will say this-- my cert was reporting it had expired (it really hadn’t, but zerossl has been odd lately?). I’ve regenerated it now - so i’ll keep an eye to see if it was just refusing to connect due to cert validation issues (though i didn’t see anything in the logs that might indicate it).
Otherwise is there anything else i can do to help diagnose?
Craig,
I was able to complete some additional testing with stereo-paired HomePod 2’s with latest-gen ATV4K.
Using the new video setting ONLY(because new audio engine and LiveTV don’t get along), one very noticeable nuance is that on play/pause/seek audio is delayed 2-3 seconds. For example, on pause, video pauses instantly, and audio continues 2-3 seconds before pausing. same for play/resume. video starts/resumes instantly, however audio is delayed about 2-3 seconds before starting. Same goes for seeking.
Hi
I have been using test flight beta for a while and everything has been fine. However, over the last few days I have been issuing playing some files and getting warning message could not direct play, no profile exists could not transcode because file is unplayable DoVi profile 5 colour space is not supported. This has never happened before
A lot of people have been getting this error, not just with beta, but the released Apple TV app. I’ve seen several threads about it but have yet to see anybody from the Plex team comment on the Dovi 5 error.
Thanks @hsousa for the update.
Unfortunately, it’s clear that Plex is headed in the opposite direction from what its users want and have voiced loud and clear in this and other threads on these forums, over on Reddit, and elsewhere.
This in particular:
You’re right, the Plex/Plex Beta/Plex Experimental Player Beta don’t use the newer tvOS 15+ AVPlayerViewController, and hence have a dated 2017-ish design. This isn’t great.
But it’s still better than the Experience Preview.
See, the thing is, the tvOS AVPlayerViewController — that’s the UI that Infuse, Netflix, TV+, and most other tvOS apps use) is the opposite of “hidden and hard to access controls”. It’s been designed by Apple to best utilise the capabilities of the Apple TV and tvOS platform. It supports things like Siri interactions (“turn on subtitles, rewind 10 seconds”, etc.). It supports interactions with the Remote widget/app built-in to iOS. It supports precise, intuitive, reliable scrubbing. It’s properly accessible. These are some of the reasons why people buy an Apple TV over other streaming boxes.
None of these things are true with the Plex Experience Preview on tvOS.
There is a reason why people loathe the YouTube player UI.
It’s because the YouTube app is a glorified webpage shoehorned into the tvOS platform, instead of a SwiftUI native app. It sucks.
You have shoehorned-in what feels like a glorified webpage, with no native OS niceties, in the view to make a UI that’s “consistent” across all platforms — whilst also sucking across all those platforms.
You want a consistent cross-platform experience.
Users want a consistent cross-app experience on their platform of choice.
As long as your direction is mis-aligned to user’s demands, you’ll have pushback.
I’m already using Infuse full-time. The app’s navigation isn’t as nice as the public/beta Plex tvOS apps is - I actually like Plex’s recommendations functionality - but the player actually works. It works reliably, first time, every time. It decodes every video and audio format I throw at it. It supports subtitles perfectly. It maintains perfect audio lip sync. It works nicely with Siri and the Apple TV remote and the iOS remote app. It just works!
That’s all we’re asking you to do. Use the same player that everyone else (except YouTube) uses. “KISS”.
It stuns me that Plex can’t seem to achieve something the much smaller Firecore team have been doing perfectly for years now.
I would be absolutely thrilled to have a Plex app which is the current tvOS navigation UI + the new AVPlayerViewController player UI.
I would be incredibly pleased with the Plex Experience navigation UI (with some improvements, especially around hover focus physics and general performance fixes) + the new AVPlayerViewController UI.
I’d settle for the Plex Experience navigation UI + the existing Experimental Player beta player UI.
But the Experience Preview player just ain’t it.
When Experience goes public, I’ll be moving my partner, parents, and grandparents over to Infuse and teaching them how to use that. At least they’re already familiar with the player UI - so it’ll just be the navigation to re-teach them.
I doubt I’ll be the only one doing this.
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While I’m glad there is some clarity on this, I’m afraid I have to agree with @Shaun_R, @dklein , and numerous others about the choice to re-invent the wheel re: the playback UI. I just don’t see the effort vs. reward.
Should we be discussing things like “why is it fully zoomed with no tap to zoom” on iOS in 2025? Or how impossible the new scrubber can be to use on iOS. Much less the other questions down the line. (Siri, PIP, etc)
Don’t get me wrong, I want Plex to have an awesome player, or I wouldn’t waste my time here. But honestly I’m not sure I have it in me to test a reconceived playback UI without seeing/understanding its benefit. Especially when AVPlayerViewController has proven its ability to perform well across many other popular and well received apps.
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I’d like to strongly suggest reconsidering this.
Nobody wants a Plex player that’s consistent across apps. This is a weird thing that many apps do, because it feels good to the product managers.
We all want a Plex app that feels “normal” on our devices. I want a Plex app that feels normal on Roku, one that feels normal on Apple TV, one that feels normal on iOS.
Consistency between Plex apps is only barely important on the home screen and when browsing.
Consistency in the player, so that Plex feels the same on different platforms, is not important at all. As others have said, that means the player experience will be compromised on every platform, for the sake of consistency nobody outside Plex wants.
It’s 1000% more important that it look/feel/behave like the normal player experience for that platform.
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Amen to that. 
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Exactly! Does Plex think that Microsoft develops Office for MacOS and not take advantage of features available there (or Windows specific features as well)?
Truly short-sighted…keep the internals as close as possible, but don’t make a “one size fits most” UI for completely different devices.
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Whilst I appreciate your personally open sentiment toward third-party apps at this current time, we have seen time and time-again companies that pivot on a dime and pull the rug under third-party apps very quickly. See: Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft Outlook for iOS, and countless others.
Twitter, Reddit, and Outlook had excellent third-party apps (Tweetie, Alien Blue, Acompli) which were acquired to become the official first-party app. Those apps subsequently got worse due to corporate priorities that were not aligned with the user’s priorities, and so new third-party apps sprang up to fill the gap. Then the rug got pulled, and users are left with only the second-rate first-party apps.
I suspect that I am not alone in desiring a first-rate, first-party app from Plex – especially when it’s a service that we pay for – and being loud when we see corporate priorities becoming unaligned from user’s priorities.
Well said. I shelled out the money for the Apple TV because it provides a premium experience. At this time, the player UI in Plex Experience for tvOS feels as though it was designed for a generic browser-based Linux kernel running on a bargain bin dual core processor, shoved into what can barely be called a “smart TV”. That’s your “lowest common denominator” – and Plex must aim higher than that.
Agreed - if there was an actual, justifiable technology-based reason to implement a custom player, then maybe the community would be more understanding. The thing is, we see Infuse working perfectly… so to us, there’s no apparent reason Plex can’t do the same thing.
Are you referring to Sonos here, rather than Spotify? Spotify messed up with their push to make their app more like TikTok, but Sonos really screwed up with their new app.
Folks pay a premium for Sonos gear, and expect a premium experience - the new Sonos app ain’t it.
Folks pay a premium for the Apple ecosystem, and expect a premium experience - the Plex Experience Preview for tvOS player ain’t it.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t tried Plex Experience on my iPhone much - tvOS is my primary Plex viewing platform. Scrubbing on tvOS is awful: it’s impossible to accurately target a time due to the lack of motion physics, combined with the issue of scrubbing occurring as soon as you swipe to reveal the player controls (rather than Apple’s standardised implementation of requiring you to first pause). YouTube does the same thing as Plex Experience on tvOS, and it’s diabolical - the number of time’s I’ve ended up scrubbing through a video whilst trying to enable captions is ridiculous!! If scrubbing on tvOS is impossible, I can only imagine the issues on iOS.
PiP is much less of a big deal on tvOS than on iOS, but the lack of PiP on either platform is pretty abysmal. Infuse can do it… why can’t Plex!
See: Microsoft’s “New Outlook” app. It’s little more than the Outlook website, shoehorned into an Electron-based web browser masquerading as an “app”. It looks and behaves nothing like any other Office app on Windows or macOS, and it sucks on both platforms. Teams suffers the same problem, too. If a corporation as big as Microsoft can’t build a high-quality consistent cross-platform experience, why are Plex trying to do the same but with a fraction of the human resources? It’s never going to end well and it’s only going to frustrate users!
Agreed. A navigation UI that’s reasonably familiar across platforms is helpful, provided that it feels “at home” on each platform. See: the Search interface using the OS-native keyboard, rather than implementing a custom keyboard which breaks not only muscle memory but also OS-native functionality including Siri dictation, iOS remote app keyboard, and accessibility. But that’s off-topic for this thread.
1000% agreed. When I pick up the remote for my Apple TV, I want a consistent cross-app experience - especially for something as fundamental as the playback UI. When I pick up the remote for a WebOS device, I want an experience that takes advantage of the Magic Remote. Learning a platform once is hard enough for most folks. Learning each app’s individual quirks just ratchets up the challenge, and people sooner just give up.
Given such a strong sentiment in this thread alone, I really hope that @Craig_Holliday, @hsousa, and the wider Plex team will reconsider their stance. I think we would all really love to see you instead pursue the new – and undeniably better – playback stack, paired with the tvOS-native AVPlayerViewController UI.
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