I am very new to Plex and Apple Tv. I just setup my Apple TV 3 and plexconnect. Media server is running on a windows 7 machine. Connection is over wifi. Video playback is smooth but I am having trouble with picture slideshow. After every three to four images the slideshow stalls and the screen goes black. After about 30 seconds it resumes the slideshow and then the pattern is repeated again. Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks.
@smailk said:
I am very new to Plex and Apple Tv. I just setup my Apple TV 3 and plexconnect. Media server is running on a windows 7 machine. Connection is over wifi. Video playback is smooth but I am having trouble with picture slideshow. After every three to four images the slideshow stalls and the screen goes black. After about 30 seconds it resumes the slideshow and then the pattern is repeated again. Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks.
Connection is over wifi, is your Win 7 machine wifi or just the Apple TV?
The issue itself could be Wifi, although “Video playback is smooth”, that’s different than sliding photo’s as video playback buffers first and then plays the media were as with a photo, each photo is loaded seperatly, so if the connection drops or weakens then this could cause the buffering.
First thing to do would be to rule out the obvious, if your media server is running through wifi, then switch it to ethernet and see what happens, if it resolves the matter then you’ve found the source of the issue. If that doesn’t resolve it, try running the Apple TV through ethernet as well. If this resolves it then again you’ve found the source of the issue.
Now it’s just a case of finding out the cause.
Is the signal strength as strong as it could be? - if not then try changing the location of the router
Is the signal at any point dropping? - This doesn’t have to be a complete drop (loss of connection) but just a few bars causing the signal to be weak.
You will need to look into all the possible signal issues both physically and virtual, but if the issue doesn’t get resolved when you switch to ethernet then it could be CPU/RAM being over used, so check to make sure that when the slide is being used that the PMS isn’t eating all that up.
First, the slideshow in the Plex App for FireTV is not the smoothest or prettiest. I just installed the Plex App on the Fire TV and first thing to check out was how it was able to slideshow pictures. I get the same problem as the OP. It will go through several photos (random number usually, sometimes 10s or sometimes only 2) and then it hangs with the “load” circle. Extremely annoying.
It does this for a picture library of 10MB photos and another library of 1.3MB photos. The bug is photo size independent. My server computer is hardwired to the router and its a top of the line router (super-fast). The load circle will just remain there even if I pause the slideshow. The photo never loads.
I checked the Ethernet activity on the server machine and it does a quick spike every 5 seconds then goes down, so I am convinced its not a network issue. I want to love Plex, so hopefully this bug gets recognized. Any color on this issue out there?
Good to know that I am not the only one having this issue. Skullzy’s explanation about the difference between video playback and a picture slideshow makes sense. By the way, my AppleTV is connected over a wifi connection but my PC is connected directly to the modem/switch via CAT5e cable. Distance between the router and AppleTV I hardly 25 feet. I will try connecting the AppleTV with a cable as well.
