NB: ShieldTV must be rooted, and the process of unlocking the bootloader will blow away everything that’s on your ShieldTV.
Basically the idea is to root your ShieldTV, delete the Plex Media Server app in /system/app, then reinstall it from the Play Store, but this time on (adopted) external storage (the faster the better, don’t cheap out here!) Now the PMS database can grow well beyond the 11GB limit on internal storage.
This is working great for me with an external USB3 SSD drive. Finally able to turn on video previews and thumbnails!
PMS updated a couple of days ago via Play Store without a hitch.
Sorry if this is old news, I haven’t seen it mentioned here. I’ve no affiliation to the XDA poster, just a happy user!
I really have no idea why Plex don’t allow this even on an unrooted ShieldTV.
EDITED: Recent updates to PMS seem to have fixed some of the instability issues I was having with this. I have been running this setup again for around 2-3 weeks now & have only had restart PMS once, & that was after a Plex App update (Not PMS), Just needed to re-select my PMS server from within the Plex App & all was well. I do manually restart the Nvidia Shield Tv every 3-4 days though, Just to make sure everything continues to run ok.
Hmm, I must say I haven’t noticed much of that myself … no crashes other than when trying to play a 4K 10-bit movie and PMS fell over (but it also did that before I rooted.) Restarting the server was via Plex->Settings->Advanced->Start PMS.
Launching PMS via Apps in Settings just gives me a screen saying that PMS should be started from within Plex.
It sounds like your external storage isn’t properly mounted maybe?
My Plex metadata database is 21GB in size so that won’t be going back to internal storage unfortunately. I could just turn off all the nice stuff I suppose but I’m used to it now - and more importantly, so is She Who Must Be Obeyed.
There’s all sorts of theories about why Plex are taking this restrictive action, and none of them make much sense.
I’ve tried two different setups with PMS on adopted storage, but both get the random restarts. First was to a fast micro SD in the SATV with an external 8TB HDD and NAS storage. The second the USB3 powered Samsung T5 500GB SSD connected to a USB3 hub with an external 3TB HDD.
Setup #1. MicroSD restarts at random and then hangs at the loading screen. No disconnects of the external 8TB HDD. Must use my wemo device to shut it off and then power back on. Often it also loses the mounted NAS on reboot.
Setup #2. T5 Samsung SSD and the external HDD would get the error at random “Drive safely disconnected” no matter if I had it connected via a USB3 hub or directly to the SATV. After fighting it I went back to setup 1, but still get the random restarts. Can’t wait for someone to come up with a solution to avoid the restarts.
