Server Version#: 4.125.1
Player Version#: “3.13.14 Linux 0”
Television model: ATVIO AT-40EA20PL
Critical issue of the Plex App for this Smart TV locking up after 20-40 minutes of playback. I have no issue with any other clients.
User Experience: Awful. After 20-40 minutes of watching a TV show or movie, the playback of the media starts to stutter. At first you see a dropped frame skip. Then another. And over the course of about 5-10 seconds the freezing gets worse and the controls of the remote are non-responsive. By the end of the 10 seconds, the playback comes to a halt and only a still image of the content is displayed, as if someone had pressed pause. The only way to recover is to leave the Plex app completely, come back in, and resume playback.
Side issue 1: Resuming playback doesn’t always work when coming back into the app. User has to resume playback, stop, and resume a second time. It works on the second attempt.
Side issue 2: Plex marks the content as played sometimes, even during freezes. This is very tedious for a user to resume playback when content is marked as played. Many steps. Ideally playback issues would be detected and content not marked as played.
The freezing seems to happen faster, even within a few minutes, if the content is 1080p instead of 720p. So if I had to guess, I think it is an error with how the Plex App is utilizing space on the television. I think it might be a storage leak or a caching issue. Also I think that the minutes-until-freezing spans multiple episodes. So depending on the length of a TV show, like a 20 minute 720p television show, the user can get through 1.5 episodes before the Plex App locks up. Either this is random or it indicates something like storage filling up, leading to a lock up. I hope this info is helpful in diagnosis.
