This has been happening for a long time now although I haven’t tried in a while on my firetv4k. My workaround is casting from any my iOS devices to a gen1 chromecast I had laying around, which has luckily never stopped working and liveTV works flawlessly there.
Can we please have the latest update from a moderator or a Plex employee as to exactly where we are at with this very annoying android based Live TV Transcoding app problem please? Is this issue likely to be resolved sometime soon? What’s happening???
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I bought a new fire TV stick in December 2020 mainly to use with Plex and my HDHomeRun tunner.
I have a Plex server on my Synology disk station and my plan was to be able to record Freeview & watch live TV (I am in the UK) and then be able to watch it on any of my devices.
The recording works fine, as does the play back on my apple TV, iPad, iPhone, MacBook, Samsung TV and windows PC. However I can not get consistent play back no matter what I do on my Firestick.
Some times it works, some times it does not work. I think it more reliable when watching a live program that is also being recored but not alway. often when you select a channel the firestick starts trying to play the channel but get stuck with the “spinning arrow thing” on the screen. When this happen it can sit for a few minutes before plex restarts or it will stay there forever until you hit the home button and restart plex. Whatever way after this has happened once no matter what you do you can not get any video to play from plex or any other app on the fire tv stick (ie BBCI player, netflix, etc). The only way to get things to working again is to restart the fire stick. The other behaviours I have seen is the tv playback stopping with an error every few minutes for no reason. I have also seen the play back working fine for a while then it starts repeating a few seconds of TV multiple time in succession. I have also seen it play back for a few minutes before the picture freezes and the sounds continues. I have also seen the sounds and the picture get out of sinc. The fire tv player also tend to develop issues when a program that is being recorded and watch at the same time comes to an end.
Before anyone say it a wifi things, its not as am running a fast network with no other issues with any other device or other apps on the fire stick.
I have searched these forums to look for answers and I see lot of people have been having issues for a considerable length of time but i don’t see any solutions (lot of solution talk about changes settings that my app does not have)
As a electronics design engineer i am very surprised by all these issues as hardware/os for fire sticks is very controlled (ie there no third party modifications to the hardware or software). Plex also only support a very limited number of tunner and I think the HomeRun range looks to be the most common. This would indicate that the software is not being tested properly before release or worst still being released to us with know bugs. The current release build feels like an alpha build.
I also think it not acceptable that i am paying for a plexpass but there is no direct method of getting support from Plex other than posting on here and hoping that someone reads it.
As things stand just now the Plex player on the Fire TV is not fit for purpose. I note that the cardboard box the fire tv stick came in has the plex logo all over it. This would imply they are a partner company with amazon and that the software should work out of the box. This is not the case.
Can you please tell me how i either fix these issues by altering settings or when a new version of software will be available to sort these issues ? I know these things can’t alway be resolved quickly but I think a route map to set our exceptions would be reasonable.
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If you have a Firestick 4k try turning off interlaced transcoding in the settings in the app.
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If you have a Firestick 4k try turning off interlaced transcoding in the settings in the app.
No such setting that I can find. Looked at all the settings on the Fire TV Plex App and the settings on the Plex server.
Firestick 4k only
I have the Firestick 4k. I don’t see the option to turn off “interlaced transcoding”. Where are you seeing this? If you are seeing it, what version of the Plex App?
The latest 8.13.1.23036 but it’s been an option for quite some time. Under settings scroll down to Advanced then all the way over to the right.
To be fore warned. If disabling this option fixes the 300 second bug for you then you will most likely still experience the 90 minute bug that does the same thing. Yea I know… I know… get it together plex!!!
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Hi @sixones
Just tested 8.14.0.23306-beta.
Still no fix. Fire Stick 4k starts buffering and seeking at exactly 5 minutes of live interlaced tv, every time. There is also a new bug that causes the player to crash when switching between channels. Every other channel will cause a crash back to the guide. I’m not exactly sure which version this new bug started with.
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Have had this issue with all 5 of my firesticks but i just tried my smartcast vizio plex app and live tv works fine.
“This release contains improvements to unreleased features.”
…
How about making existing features work? You know. Like Live TV…
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It’s coming, and I’m hoping to share a build on this thread later in the week. It’s however not been a simple change (hence the delay) and impacts all aspects of playback with the Android app, it however fixes the Live TV issue mentioned on this thread and greatly improves playback performance (start time and seeks).
The changes made in the latest build are from different members of the team and don’t end up changing or impacting the work that happens for playback.
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The issue is down to the channel from the tuner, we can test it with what we have access too but as there is thousands of channels around the world all using different standards we can’t test them all across all the different devices and possible combinations.
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I am sorry but this reply does not make any sense. The uk uses the DVB-T2 standard as large number of other countries. This is a common standard and an open standard. Millions of TV sets and set top box are out there and work without problems. I don’t see how the specific tv channel has any relevance to testing your software to an international standards. To be honest I think the interface you need to deal with is between the hdhomerun and plex. Ie the hdhomerun does all the hard work converting the rf signal to a bit stream over Ethernet. This works fine with all my apple devices but fails with the firetv sticks.
Only 8 channels in the UK use DVB-T2, the rest use a variation of DVB-T, there’s a mix depending on your local area. But this is beside the point as its the transport method which is handled by the tuner box as you mentioned. The problem comes down to the stream contents and not the way its transported, for instance is the channel using interlacing, do adverts or airing switches change the format of the channel and the encoding that is used etc…
For the issue in question though, it’s happening because the Live TV being played back is interlaced and sadly the Fire TV devices can’t handle interlaced content so we end up transcoding them. When this happens our HLS implementation has issues with the way the live stream is formatted and it bugs out after a few minutes of playback. Hence the need to rewrite our HLS implementation to make it more robust and reliable.
Saying that though, UK channels should be playing back fine so you might be seeing a different issue to the one mentioned in this thread (playback ends after a few minutes). This particular issue only seems to be happening for American channels on a Fire TV, and always happens, it doesn’t randomly not work and then work fine.
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What ever way I would like a way to resolve all these issues. As I say I don’t have a problem if I use my iPad, Apple TV or MacBook. But when I used my firetv it causes fire stick to crash so badly that will not play any video without a compete restart.
Plex on the firetv is virtually unusable at the moment from a live tv point of view
I appreciate the explanation and I am happy to hear that there has been progress. Looking forward to testing out the new version and hopefully having Live TV working.
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What you are describing sounds unrelated to the issue on this thread. Would you be able to grab the logs for me?
Steps for fetching the logs from a Fire TV are available here; Android, Android TV, Fire TV Logs | Plex Support
@sixones What about the similar bug that is happening as mentioned in the threads below among many other threads?
- Live TV & DVR loops through buffer mid-stream and can't recover on it's own
- Plex Tuner service closing connection after 90 mins
It’s producing the same errors as the log posted in this thread 23 days ago except it’s not interlaced content and is happening way later in the playback? Surely you’ve seen the other posts about this issue too?
Could they be related?
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In addition to this issue, when I go to play “live tv” from the beginning (during a recording), it seems to play for a second then rewind and continue that behavior. Does anyone else experience this? Is it a related problem?
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