Infinite buffering when opening files on Nvidia SHIELD player (and other issues)

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Hi team,

I’ve been having some issues with the NVIDIA SHIELD Pro 2019 as client only. When trying to open a file, sometimes I will get an “infinite buffer” (the spinning circle never stops).

To fix this, I need to force close the app and re-open it.

95% of the time once I bypass this, media plays fine without issues. Even if that’s a 80 mbit 4K remux file.

It used to be something I just lived with, but recently it has started to get worse. Now it sometimes takes a few tries to get it working.

When playing on phone or iPad, it works fine. I even tried opening up the media file that the SHIELD could not open (infinite buffer) from my iPad and it played instantly. Both said “Direct Play” in playback info.

This is all with Direct Play content, HDMI passthrough on, and referesh rate matching on. Plex Pass hardware acceleration enabled.

One other issue I experienced is that sometimes some specific Dolby Vision content cannot be resumed, and must be “Played from start”. I’m not sure if that’s related.

Alongside this, I’ll occasionally get full freezes in Plex when playing a high bit rate file, where my remote stops working (tested both Harmony and SHIELD native remote), and then eventually Plex crashes.

My server is hosted on Windows 10 with GTX1060, Ryzen 5600, 16GB of RAM. I run Windows Storage Spaces with 15TB across a variety of SSDs and 1 HDD. Everything is wired via Ethernet.

I’ve already tried factory resetting the SHIELD.

Server Version#: 1.23.6.4810
Player Version#: latest (non-BETA).

20 Likes
2

Looks like this is a bug in Plex on SHIELD, many other users experiencing it:

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3

I experience this as well.

4

It does this to me too but I don’t have SHIELD, I use the Zidoo X9S TV box, many of my friends with the same box have the same problem, but unlike your experience I just can’t open any content anymore, not just every a lot … I opened a topic with the logs at this address

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5

Here are some logs from when this happens on my Shield… As well as PMS logs(resides on different server)

Media plays instantly via app.plex.tv… And normally plays instantly on all of my devices.

Player version: 8.21.0.26725 (beta)

shield_logs_7_22_21.txt (4.9 MB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-07-22_15-34-03.zip (9.0 MB)

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6

I want to flag if it helps the Plex team, that this seems to happen mainly when resuming,at least for me.

Is this the right forum for bug reports?

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7

Same for me. It’s been intermittent for a few weeks. Plex is completely unusable on Shield or my Android phone as of the last 24 hours.

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8

Same issue for me on the shield, reboot seems to help for now but is very annoying.

9

It’s a crapshoot on my Shield TVs. I’ll get infinite spinning on one show, back out to the “TV Shows” menu and pick a different show…plays right away. Doesn’t seem media related, but indeed a bug in the Android TV client. :frowning:

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I’m guessing my issue is related - shield 2017 as plex client only (latest version), PMS running on headless debian with plexplass, latest version, on an i7 with quicksync h/w.

I get the infinite buffer thing (spinning circle never stops as you said) though only for anything with EAC3 and then again not always. I noticed that if I force transcode it works. I tried manually disabling EAC3 support on shield audio advanced options, essentially making it report to plex that it doesn’t know what EAC3 is, I never have this issue (not yet anyway!).

As you said iPad, android phone, etc all work - only shield has this issue and only for the past couple of months.

My case seems very specific to EAC3 though - have you tried finding such patterns?

11

exact same issue here, server running on Synology but same Nvidia Shield. Has been working just perfectly for ages up until a week or so ago.

1 Like
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For my android-based devices i downgraded to version 8.19 it seems the last one that works, even if it is not a solution at least for the moment it is the only way … but it is possible that we have to report the bugs on a forum , without having a more professional way?

1 Like
13

I’ve seen this issue as well, and a host of other issues:

  • Stopping in the middle of a movie to tell me the server isn’t powerful enough (A dual CPU, 12-core/24 hyperthreaded Xeons, 36GB of RAM, SSDs with RAM caching, 10GBps network, NVidia GTX 1050 for hardware transcoding which it never does, and only has 1 or 2 streams at a time).
  • A “buffering” circle that never stops in the middle of a movie.
  • Random crashing.
  • Failure to remember where you were in a movie (really annoying with the buffering of death above).
  • Refuse to start playing a movie (Buffering circle that never goes away).
  • Super high bandwidth usage – like using 180Mbps non-stop for a movie that only needs 8Mbps (Yes, I know about buffering, but when the total transfer is 10x the total size of the file, that’s not just buffering)
  • Occasionally locking up and becoming unresponsive until it crashes back to the shield main menu.
  • Shows not getting marked as watched (or more correctly, the screen not updating).

I’ve tried everything from changing wireless routers, removing APs (thinking it might be a wireless issue even though it was rock solid for over a year) and getting over 380Mbp/s whenever I test, running pingplotter pinging the shield every .1 seconds for over 24 hours. I changed my server network card. I upgraded my internal network to 10Gbps (card, switches). Added software caching to the server (PrimoCache). Added more memory on the server. Enabled/Disabled hardware transcoding (Nvidia GTX 1050). Looked over all the logs, and ran packet sniffers to look at the transfers. Reset the shield back to factory settings (which seemed to work for a bit until everything got auto-upgraded).

What finally worked? Sideloading an old version of the plex client back to [8.5.2.20133]. Every single one of my issues have disappeared. Needless to say, I turned off all auto-updates and it’ll stay that way until such time that I find a compelling reason to deal with all those headaches again.

2 Likes
14

Seems like it’s an Android TV issue.

Glad we can get some visibility on this to hopefully help Plex get it fixed.

I like the latst features as well, especially the UI, so hesitant to roll back, haha

1 Like
15

Just posting to say I’m getting this too. Playback will freeze (or not start at all), it will start to buffer and all I can do is reboot the Shield (the device completely stops responding to the remote control). I also use the Shield in client-only mode, and am running a separate Plex server on my home network.

This issue first started for me at Plex client version 8.16.0 - everything before that is fine for me. I’m currently running 8.15.2 and it seems more stable.

Edit: Wired network, mechanical disk storage for media library

16

Having the exact same issue. Not sure when it started as I’ve been on vacation and updated server a few times remotely and the shield also got a few updates within that timeframe. Have to go back and restart the movie 3-5 times before it starts. Annoying as f! Force close plex didn’t do anything for me… rebooting shield didn’t do anything… Subtitles on/off didn’t do anything…

HDMI passthru on, framerate matching and all that is off, subtitles set to Automatic, automatic quality set to off, everything set to play maximum quality.

17

Having same issue since latest update. Any fixes for this? It’s a terrible bug driving me nuts.

18

+1 for me - Infinite buffering when opening files on Nvidia Shield

Been happening for a couple months now.

19

seeing same thing in shields started recently on two different shields. all types of video playback, including personal videos

20

I started a thread on Reddit and received lots of replies with people experiencing the same issue there as well. Glad to know its not just me, but disappointed the fix seems to be out of my control.

2 Likes