Server Version#: 1.21.3.4021
Player Version#: 7.12 (22653)
tvOS Version#: 14.4 (18K802)
macOS Version#: 11.2.1 (20D74)
During playback – anywhere from a couple minutes worth to nearly an hour; it varies wildly – playback will stop with the “Can’t continue playback because the connection to your server was lost” error. When this happens, the connection to the server can’t be re-established to even browse its contents until I sleep and awaken the Apple TV (killing and relaunching the Apple TV Plex app doesn’t fix it, neither does restarting Plex Media Server). Simply sleeping the Apple TV and immediately waking it back up allows the Plex app to reconnect to the server right away and I can continue playback. The Apple TV app doesn’t even need to be relaunched for it to start working again. Until the next time it loses its connection to the server and I have to do this dance over again. And again.
The Apple TV is connected via wifi, but whenever the issue happens the connection to the wifi is still good. Other apps on the Apple TV continue to work fine, though none of them are accessing content on the internal network.
This has been happening for a month or two now. I found a thread on here that had several people mentioning rolling back to PMS 1.20.1.3252 fixed the issue for them, but that didn’t work in my case.
Plex folks will typically ask for logs that cover the server startup / player startup / playback “start” events. What you provided may be too truncated for them to help.
How is everything connected? Wired, wireless?
The server is noticing that there has been a change in its network connectivity. Both the server and client freak out about being unable to communicate.
Perhaps a wireless issue, wiring issue, or router issue? Do you have multiple routers broadcasting the same SSID? (I’m totally grasping at straws. )
Or perhaps there is VPN or network filtering software on the server, or something else that might block or change connectivity?
The server is connected via ethernet. The Apple TV is wireless connected to the 5GHz SSID (and is able to pull sustained 400Mbps to external networks). The 2.4GHz SSID is disabled on the modem – a Telus Wi-fi Hub – as initially I thought it bouncing back and forth between the two networks was the cause of the constant lost connections. And said Wi-fi Hub is the only router in my place.
I did spot the regular network change notifications in the log but found it interesting that it reported no changes were actually made. And it’s especially odd that the supposed changes were on the PMS side, when the computer is wired in and isn’t connected to any wireless networks (though the wifi is enabled on the computer; a 2020 iMac).
No filtering software or enabled VPNs on the iMac either!
I’ll be going to watch something again shortly, so getting a fresh set of untruncated logs shouldn’t be an issue
And you mentioned that sleep/unsleep resolves the issue, but killing and relaunching the ATV app doesn’t. That’s weird, and makes me think “network” more than “Plex”.
Although wired should be more reliable, you could try the iMac on WiFi too. Maybe it’s as simple as an intermittent cabling issue, especially since Plex doesn’t think anything has actually changed. (And testing that would feel like “doing something” …)
I still don’t really have great ideas for you, so hopefully Plex folks will speak up.
That’s definitely the strangest part of it: sleep/unsleep on the Apple TV fixes it, but restarting both the ATV app and the server doesn’t fix it. But once I unsleep, the ATV app pretty well immediately reconnects to the server once I go into it. Makes me think it’s the ATV that’s having its local network connection go wonky; because whenever this happens, all the other apps on the ATV work fine still.
I’ll try both turning off the wifi on the iMac and separately connecting it to my wifi network, though I’m loathe to do that because I get the full 960Mbps on my iMac over ethernet and it’s … less … on wifi
Everything is DHCP, and aside from the etherneted iMac, everything is on the wifi. But all the devices – a total of 6 – have their own IPs and they’ve been holding onto their leases for quite some time now. For example, the ATV has been .70 for as long as I’ve been checking its IP to see if it was changing during the connection drops.
Ok, took about 36 minutes of playback for it to die this time.
An interesting observation: I wasn’t able to get at the ATV logs from my iMac (which has just the ethernet connection). I was able to get them from my phone like I did the first time. So it’s like my router loses its bridge between the wired and wireless devices on its network?
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