I am a recent PlexPass lifetime subscriber that came over when Google Play Music was shutting down.
I started using Plexamp a few months ago with my v2 Chromecast and I like the Now Playing screen when Chromecasting. It shows the Album Art, artist, album and track info as well as what’s going to play next in addition to moving things around to avoid burn in.
I recently purchased the new Chromecast with Google TV and started using the Plex App that is available from the play store for Android TV. When I play music through that app, the artwork and info shows full screen for a little while (I’m pretty sure it’s 10 minutes), and then ambient mode kicks in. When this happens, the current song title, artist and album cover appear in the bottom left corner as a small overlay on top of the ambient mode image. The album title does not display here. As soon as the song changes to the next track, the small album art changes to the plex logo and then the album art never changes again.
While I am able to disable the ambient mode in Google TV settings, it disables it for everything. Is this a bug? Can the Google TV Plex music player not just display artwork, album and track title continuously like it does when using Chromecast? Or at least not trigger ambient mode. I don’t have Spotify, so I’m not sure if that does the same thing, but I just tested with Youtube Music and it plays music without activating ambient mode.
I’d like to report being affected by a similar behavior / issue. I’m using the Plex app on the Chromecast with Google TV and playing music. After 5 minutes, the Chromecast switches over to the ambient mode, and the now playing info shows up in the lower left corner.
I’m not experiencing the issue with the album art updating like luxcious mentioned. And I would add that I actually like that the ambient mode screensaver kicks in and lets the music keep playing with details from Plex showing in the corner. However, the major issue I’m running into is that after it has been in ambient mode for the amount of time that the Chromecast is configured to turn off (power saver), the Chromecast will abruptly turn off in the middle of playing music from Plex.
If Plex could somehow send a “keep alive” signal to the Chromecast so that it won’t power off while music is playing, I would be very appreciative. While I like the ambient mode, I’d also be okay with Plex preventing it from kicking in like luxcious suggests (and like the YouTube app functions).
Plex has worked very well with the new Chromecast so far overall. Would be great if this one thing could be fixed!
I second this issue. I can play Plex music to a Chromcast /wTV dongle and it shows album art for awhile and then kicks into the library of photos that I have pointed to on the google/photos. The apparently the “ambient” mode kicks in and the screen goes black, the music stops even though the playlist is not finished.
I don’t know how to access the ambient mode to see if it can be extended or turned off so I’ve tried successfully to run this on an older Firestick V2. The photo library in that case is pointing to Amazon Photos instead of Google and it’s on a different display / room of the home.
So now what? The google device is clearly better in every other way.
