BUG: Toshiba FireTV playback freezes for plex AND amazon video after TV sleep

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 4.51.1 (and earlier)
Player Version#: 8.18.1.25719 (and earlier)

I have a Toshiba 4k Fire TV Edition running Fire TV Home Version 6242057.1 (and a number of previous releases)
I have found that if I use the TV’s built-in SLEEP function while playing Plex videos it can cause the entire video subsystem on the FireTV to be messed up next time I turn the TV on.

  • The Fire TV will play the previews on the home page fine
  • The YouTube app will work fine
  • The Netflix app may work fine
  • Any Amazon video will just spin the spinner for ever
  • Plex will usually look like it is playing, but the time shown on the player bar will not move. If I use fwd/rew to skip forward or back, one frame is displayed as if the player is paused.
  • Plex will sometimes play the content super fast for 10-15 seconds, then freeze the player like above.

The only way I’ve been able to get things working again is to reboot the fire tv.

Luckily I have found a workaround (It is not nice, but it seems to work):

The workaround seems to rely on another issue I’ve been having:

Newer versions of plex seem to have difficulty with auto-play next episode. It will often (almost always) get stuck at the end of the SECOND episode I play - this only started happening after the intro/title-skip feature was added (and used). It’ll just sit displaying the final frame (usually a dark image) of the second episode. If I hit FFWD it’ll kick it into life and move to the next episode.

The workaround takes advantage of this, as when the TV goes to sleep during this pause it does not usually need to be rebooted after.

  • Set TV’s sleep timer to be 2x the length of an episode (or longer)
  • Start playback of 1st episode
  • Use intro-skip to bypass the titles (this seems to be an important step)

Plex will play 1st episode, then 2nd, then not start the 3rd. If sleep occurs during this time I’m good for the next day.

This has been going on for some months now, over multiple plex server/client updates.

Happy to provide any diagnostic logging required.

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Additional info - initially I was playing content from an old NAS through the Plex Server app running on Nvidia Shield. Then recently I updated to a new NAS (QNAP TS-653D) running the native Plex Server on it. The problem remains.

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I experience most of this as well on a 4k Toshiba FireTV as well.

The difference I have is that the system will never enter sleep. I left it on after the freeze of the second episode. It stayed frozen > 12 hours.

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Since my original post, both the FireTV and Plex player have had a couple of updates - and yet the problem still occurs… possibly a little less regularly, but definitely way too often.

I almost wonder if the Plex app is holding onto something like an audio/video mutex/semaphore and that’s why the frozen/won’t-play video issue also affects Amazon video titles also.

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