Constantly having to reboot AppleTV

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1

Starting a couple of months ago I’m having to constantly reboot my Apple TV to get it to work with PlexConnect. I can navigate through the UI just fine but whenever I try to play a video I get the spinner for a minute or so and then it says the video failed to load. Rebooting the Apple TV always fixes it for 1 or 2 videos before it breaks again.

I’m running Plex + PlexConnect on a Mac Mini.

Any ideas?

2

Welcome to the club(s):

https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/121863/ios-8-black-screen-of-death
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/145463/atv-enters-perpetual-buffering-during-videotape

Im not sure if its the newer iOS, PMS, PlexConnect or what exactly but its a known issue, the higher the resolution/audio track the sooner the aTV buffers/locks/reboots for some users. Unfortunately @iBaa and @Roidy only can code this wonderful code for aTV’s to view PMS content, plex.tv can only author PMS, apple can only author and design aTV’s and their firmware which is proprietary. Don’t expect a device with limited capabilities to not have issues, its a miracle that the PlexConnect developers even came up with this to begin with because the other way was only for jailbroken aTV2’s but even then the code wasn’t the problem, the hardware of the aTV2/3 just can’t handle it from what I can tell and constant reboots happen using heavier PIL enabled themes of PlexConnect just navigating thru the menus, xbmc/kodi reboots happen all the time viewing 720 content on aTV2’s and development is no longer maintained for them for a reason same with the old native plex app for aTV2 for a good reason, the device. If you looking to run higher bandwidth/audio content I would recommend a good PHT client or other client(s) with some decent specs until if when this can be resolved or recode all your content to .mkv. I wish I had a better solution for you but personally I do not.

aTV2 256mb of ram
aTV3 512mb of ram

3

I found found a couple of ceilings to stay under when producing rips to use with Plex-Plexconnext-atv3. These have worked 100% for me feeding my atv3 from an iMac(2012 loaded) running both PMS & Plexconnect, movies on an externally connected thunderbolt drive. Atv currently connected via ethernet over powerline that does supply a verified min of 20Mbps. ATV connected to receiver via hdmi, 55" Plasma connected to receiver via hdmi. My other ATV is in the bedroom and is connecting via 5ghz wireless router.

Issues like you described tend to fall into one or two (could be both at the same time) areas, first being strength of connection atv back to PMS, and secondly the makeup of the file being served. That’s not to say config settings in PMS, Plexconnect or the atv don’t contribute to issues as well.

  • While some mkv’s work others don’t, so I always handbrake to m4v(mp4).
  • Some movies with media bit rates over 10,000kbps buffer constantly, I try to keep them just under 10k
  • external srt’s for subtitles force PMS into transcoding which really slows things down creating buffering. I add the foreign/alien(klingon for ex) track in handbrake and usually burn it in.
  • to create a BD rip via handbrake I start with the following. There are more adjustments available but these ussally do the trick: select the atv3 present then turn on web enhanced, quality slider to 20, audio 1st track ac3-5.1channels, 2nd track aac-dobly pro logic II. when done add the movie to PMS. Check the info and see what the media kbps is, if larger than 10k redo increasing the slider from 20 to 21.

In terms of final quality output viewed, subjective obviously but my ripped blurays look great.

4

The whole point of Plex is that you don’t have to convert your files in order to watch them.

How is PlexConnect setup in the settings (on apple tv) ? transcode + subtitles: iOS,PMS ? this should work (depending on the format in the mkv container), but wireless is asking for trouble and via powerline as well. 20Mbps is not enough as that is barely 2.5MB/s. If you set the aTV to use max 12Mbs for the transcode, you should be fine.

5

…error in my first response the powerline is providing 20MBps not Mbps. Sorry for the confusion.