Yesterday I had this infinite buffering with one episode again. As mentioned by Stanzilla it could have something to do with the subtitles. This particular episode has two forced subtitle streams. One is ASS and the other is SRT. Plex tries ASS first but the result is endless buffer. If I switch to SRT it plays immediately. Switch back to ASS - endless buffer.
Episodes without any subtitles seem to start without buffering. Maybe this is one part of the problem but I think there are more. Nevertheless most of my files have any type of subtitle so maybe this is the reason I see this buffering problem that often.
Can we get a response from Plex Employee? Plex client on Nvidia shield is a hot mess.
We should not have to play roulette on whether media will stream or not.
The nightly posted some time ago has been working much better for me as of late. I’m hesitant to say it fixes everything only because I haven’t been using plex very much the past few weeks.
I’m seeing this behaviour too. a 7 month old thread and bug and it’s still not fixed!!
Plex, stop focussing the latest shiny idea that someone in the team had and fix the existing bugs and implement the features that are actually being requested by your paying users.
I found this searching for the exact issues as reported by everyone here, and assumed it was a Plex problem. Then, Netflix’s app started having similar issues - it would buffer up to a certain %, and then fail out. Like Plex, Netflix worked on my other devices. I have 1 GB Ethernet from my home server (with ample processing power) to the SHIELD, and 1 GBps internet service (fully hardwired) so… it’s probably a SHIELD problem.
As I was poking around settings, I noticed that the SHIELD reported <1 GB free internal space - ODD, as I have an SD card inserted and most apps migrated to it - no media on ‘internal storage’, so there shouldn’t be more than 1 GB used out of the ~6GB the SHIELD has. There was 250+ GB free on the SD card. I tried moving apps back/forth, etc. Uninstall / Reinstall apps, etc. but couldn’t account for the missing internal storage.
Finally, I bit the bullet and ‘Factory reset’ the SHIELD. It had been running for the last several major overhauls to the SHIELD Experience (or whatever they call their UI), and figured with modern accounts sharing most settings, re-setup would be quick. Interestingly, after the factory reset of the SHIELD, it reported an error “Incompatible SD Card” and that the SD card wasn’t useable. However, in the settings, ‘Format for internal storage’ was available - since there was nothing on the SD Card that wasn’t on my storage server, I gave that a try. Finally, all the apps went back on as expected, and once signed in, I gave it a try.
To my surprise, that seems to have completely fixed (for several days now, at least) all my problems with Netflix and Plex (buffering happens near instantly, if at all). The SHIELD reports >4.5GB free internal storage, and things are going great.
I can only speculate (and since I did factory reset the device, any logs are lost to the ether), but I believe that between the major updates of the SHIELD UI (which is when things started going wroung), they (meaning SHIELD or maybe Android itself), made changes to handling SD Card storage and/or internal Storage file systems, resulting in some sort of storage memory leak, or just left too much junk in storage.
I think the problem is caused when the device sends a write to disk (storage flash) that doesn’t complete, or subsequent reads fail in an unexpected way, the Android system may not report those well to an app like Plex/Netflix, and just leave the app waiting until either an App watchdog times out the process, or the user aborts. This would explain why the problem is so hard to reproduce, and leaves such ambiguous symptoms in the logs - it depends on the particular device’s update history and state of the storage file system.
Anyway just my 2 cents… I had been hating my SHIELD for a while now, and had tried the usual suspects (device reboots, checking switches/wiring) and gone with half-measures like reinstalling apps a few times, but this factory reset seemed to be the only thing that made an improvement. So, for anyone here, I’d recommend a full factory reset and reinstall everything - it might just be worth your time.
Due to errors related to the first buggy new android release, i performed several factory resets. Buffering error was still there and disappered after using the experimantal builds provided some times ago. So I doubt it is an shield issue and guess that your error is only similar to this buffering error.
So in my case it was the Windows Defender Antivirus Network Inspection Service (NisSrv.exe) causing all 4K DV/HDR remuxes to stall after a couple of minutes and show the infinite buffering animation on my Shield.
The Windows Defender NIS service and Plex had pretty high CPU usage whilst direct playing. I fully disabled Windows Defender and all is well again, Plex is also back to minimal CPU usage whilst direct playing. Might help someone else.
Guys, do yourselves a favor, use Kodi with PlexKodiConnect (not the official Plex addon) on your Shield. I setup everything yesterday and couldn’t be happier with the results.
The Kodi library is constantly in sync with your Plex one, playback starts instantly (once setup correctly), everything (skip intro, resume progress, latest added, etc.) just works the same and if you want to tinker, Kodi is a much better program for it.
Bonus is you can, for example, use other Kodi addons in tandem with your Plex media now. Trakt without needing vip accounts, subtitle addons, highly configurable skins, etc.
Latest nightly build 8.31.0.3125 has worked about 95% of the time. The only instance i saw in the last week was stopping a show mid play from tv shows menu, going to settings quick, going to home, and trying to play it from where it left off, all in about 30 seconds. Had to exit and retry once.
Thats a vast vast improvement compared to a 10% success rate.
