So I took my maiden voyage of playing one of my TV shows that are in WMV format. I open my NVidia Shield Pro TV 2019 go to PLEX, go to my WMV TV Show and click to play it. First time said something about updating something for the media. Then when I went to play again spun then showed the PLEX logo and was back at the main PLEX screen. Does this over and over when I try to play the video. Note I’m currently sitting here watching this same episode on my XBox 360 with Emby. So not sure where the problem resides. Thoughts?
Are you sure that the Plex app on your Shield is fully updated? What you describe sounds like an old bug.
Is your Plex server updated as well?
As far as I know. Installed this a week ago and since have had two updates I’ve accepted. Here are the relevant log items I think
plex.log (216.7 KB)
When I go to Plex Web it shows Version 4.22.3 if that helps.
Oh and for additional info:
Plex Server Windows version running on dedicated PLEX server
The media in question is on a different windows 7 computer share but is accessible by PLEX
Computers are domain based.
Not sure about the media being accessible from Shield but not sure if the Shield is playing the file directly or it’s routing thru Plex? Just a thought if it’s an access issue.
Sorry, this is the log from the server. And since it doesn’t show the Plex server starting up, there is no version number in it.
The version of the server is shown in the web app, under Settings - Server - General
The version of the web app has nothing to do with the version number of the plex app on the Shield.
Open the App Store app on the Shield, go to ‘My Apps’ and see if there are updates listed.
In the Plex app on the Shield, enter the Settings dialog. It will show you the app version at the bottom, right.
Will check on the Shield version when I can get my fricken family to stop watching TV.
Also when a device can play media direct does it still get routed thru the PLEX server or does PLEX tell it to play the media direct from the source?
Thanks.
Maybe I don’t have to wait, is this accurate from Authorized Devices in the web console?
7.23 is very old.
Current public version is 7.30
N.B. it doesn’t appear that your server is logged into a plex.tv user account. This will make it impossible for some client types to find the server.
It will also make it impossible to fetch some necessary codecs, which in turn makes it impossible to transcode certain files.
It shows On that same version page Server signed in as … and then has a Sign Out button.
OK I did the update which wasn’t easy to find. Doesn’t seem like Google Play considers PLEX downloaded or something as it came pre-installed so had to search for it and then update. That said, it kind of plays now? The picture has pixelation happening and there is no audio coming out.
Can you get me the contents of the Plex XML info of one such episode?
Go into the preferences of the plex app on the Shielkd and disable the New Player. Then test again.
Your server hasn’t communicated with plex.tv since about 2 years ago. So something is wrong.
Oh, yeah I created a whole different account. When I started building my smart home a year ago created a new account and everything I do across the board is on a new account so that’s why…
Here’s the xml movie-xml.zip (1.2 KB)
I’ll try switching the player the next window I have and let you know. Need to annoy the family in between each show they watch so have to sit there an hour everytime I want to test something.
But your shield appears on the old account. Which is weird.
Can’t you tell your WMC to record in H.264, like any decent recorder? 
WMV is the only thing it knows - and that’s why MCEBuddy was invented a hundred years ago… to convert that ‘78 letter cussword’ back into something the rest of the world can work with…
Nope WMV is all it does it’s Microsoft and won’t get into “decent” recorders argument. 
For me switching in general would be near impossible as I have over a thousand movies that are in WMV HD and won’t be re-encoding those, just new ones going forward will be H.265. So unfortunately whatever media server I use needs to support WMV for 15 years of legacy content.
MCEBuddy could do it for you - over time - in manageable chunks - pretty much automatically - as you feed it things. You could try one and see how it looks. I find them perfectly acceptable and you don’t even have to bit rate starve them like I do.
I’ll think about it but right now not committed to PLEX yet so making that switch would be something I’d do once I find it’s working out for me. When I first went this path it was for two reasons:
- It seemed like it supported WMV files.
- It seemed like if I decide to eliminate Windows Media Center and XBox 360 devices, PLEX seemed to be the furthest along to technically replace WMC for recording shows.
Note: I own MCEBuddy but taking my movie files that were encoded with commercial tools like Premiere Pro and cleaned up with NeatVideo kind of makes me nausious.
Awww, that’s a shame.
I’m a long-time VideoReDo junky - and frankly, that’s the best $100 I ever spent on anything. <—if something was ‘library worthy’ - it got ‘the treatment’ in frame accurate precision - then converted for Direct Play.
Oh well…
So I set new player to off and things look identical on the screen like nothing at all changed. Still very pixelated and still no audio at all. The web console says it’s direct playing the audio and video.
Yea, that sounds very familiar - they used to annihilate my Rokus and FireTVs, the difference is they transcoded (looked fine, relatively speaking) - and we couldn’t have that.
MCEBuddy came to town - and we still use it to rip those pesky 608s out of video streams (in about a minute) - for it to place along side the file it just made - SO I CAN FIX 'EM!
lol
Not to be annoying and maybe that’s the answer, but I just installed the Emby client on the Shield TV and other than almost getting blasted by the volume level it outputted of the audio, it plays these without issue. Ugh.
The sad truth is, WMV is on its way out.
Even MS has learned now, that they cannot force their own proprietary formats onto users for eternity – in the hope that this will “lock” them into their eco-system.
And hardware and software support for those proprietary formats is also fading, since manufacturers often don’t test them as rigorously as standardized formats.
That being said, could you prepare me a (preferably short, ~30sec ) sample file which can be used to reproduce the faulty playback on the Shield?
Please upload it to GDrive or similar and send me the download link per PM.
I will forward it to the developers. Let’s see if it can be helped.
