Agree … same issues for months. Have in household with 4 Shields and PLEX messing up on everyone. KODI IS fine, Apple TV PLEX is fine … just the PLEX App on the Shield and Shield Pro … it is really disappointing with a paid PLEX Pass subscription.
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The issue is not about the shield, because playing with Kodi, evben with the Plex app on the iphone and using the shield integrated Chromecast is working. Only the Android app is not working.
I have also a xiaomi Mibox S … same issue. so definitvely an app issue !
We any further with this? Get this issue with 2017 shield and Shield Pro. Even have the issue with the older supposed last known working version. As with others, web, phone, kodi Plex etc all working perfectly fine.
Have just tried the latest beta and that still has spinning circle. Have to restart the file about 4 times on average to get it working. Interestingly a 60gb MP4 file works fine but a 10gb mkv requires those restarts.
For me 2 days ago it was working fine. Straight into playback.
Then yesterday back to spinning wheel again until you stop & start it several times (f your lucky).
Turns out once I disabled cloudflare proxy on the server, everything is well again with my shield and plex. So bizarre that webos plex and kodi plex don’t have a problem with the proxy.
I have the same issue on 2019 shield pro, even SD shows will start to buffer and wont continue playing until I go back and start it again.
It is really frustrating.
There is no problem with any other streaming application, only plex on shield.
Its not related to the server as the issue doesnt happen on any other client, including android phone.
It’s starting to be frustrating…
Edit: installed 64bit plex client from few posts above and for first 3 hours buffering was happening really rarely, but then the situation got the same as before, constant bufferings on shield tv pro…
Just adding that I’m also starting to have this issue on my 4k Firestick (older version). Setting playback to transcode instead of direct play band-aids it for me. Not ideal but it’ll have to do for now. Haven’t tried reinstalling the client yet but from what I can see in this thread, that didn’t work anyways. Just glad that my Toshiba Amazon Fire TV is working great without any issues…yet.
Sorry, didn’t really add anything to this thread other than a “me too but on this other device” statement.
I suggest trying without burned in subtitles, that helps with some.
Adding to this with my shield tv (2019). Endless spinning loading, need to reboot the shield and even then it’s not guaranteed. Come on guys, fix this, what do we need to do to help you diagnose this.
Ok just putting this out there. I had an issue similar to the original. When opening a file, sometimes it just sat on infinite buffering. I would have to go back to the menu and click play again and sometimes repeat this process a few times to get the file to open and start playing. Once playing, I never had an issue, even when pausing/unpausing from the video screen (I did have the issue resuming from a previous position)
Anyway, just wanted to say I have not had any issues in the last week since upgrading to Android 11, which is very promising. I only use Plex on the SHIELD as a client, not server, so don’t suffer from the other issues associated with Android 11 and Plex server.
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Good to know. I’ve been holding off updating when I saw the multiple issues raised over on the Nvidia forum.
I’ve been having this problem for months on my Shield TV 2019. Upgrading to Android 11 seemed to make no difference, happens at about the same frequency.
Had this on my Sony Bravia Android TV as well. In fact I bought the Shield hoping it would fix the issue…
I’ve been having this problem since around Feb 2021. I was hopeful that upgrading to android 11 would fix it, but it hasn’t.
Just updating from my previous posts in this thread.
Still getting infinite buffering problems. Seems to occur completely randomly. Might be 5 minutes into a film, might be an hour in. Often once it happens it will continue to happen frequently thereafter. Exiting Plex completely and restarting will sometimes improve it.
Updating Shield to Experience 9 (plus the hotfixes) has had no positive impact on this Plex issue.
Having a similar issue with infinite buffering as well on my Shield Pro (2019).
I notice the issue with TV shows frequently… however, I don’t recall this happening on Movies (I watch more TV than I do Movies).
The issue for me seems to happen most often when I watch a TV Episode, finish it, stop it before the next episode plays, and put the Shield to sleep with Plex still open on the Episode summary screen. Then when I wake up the shield and try to play the next episode… endless loading/buffering.
Generally, as others have mentioned… some of the workarounds seem to be trying to play a different Show/Movie, and then going back to play the one that was endlessly buffering… or to force close and start the Plex app again.
Had this issue before on my Shields and manually rolled back to player version 7.31-ish (still allowed selection of the old video player). Accidently updated the living room Shield to Android 11 and found that the old apk did not work, so I updated to the most recent version of the Plex player in the living room. Guess what? Intermittent playback issues with the buffering circle. Random in when it occurs, but I have to force stop app and clear the cache and then launch it again. This is on a old school 2015 model. Have not updated to Android 11 on the Shields in the family room or bedroom and the old player just plays anything that you throw at it, no buffering what so ever. Could the devs possibly give us the choice to still enable the old video player on the newest versions of the app until the issue is resolved? I have a sneaking suspicion that it is an Exoplayer related issue. No issues with playback on any of my iOS or Roku devices either.
Just wondering if there are any potential updates or news from the devs on this issue?
It’s been a problem for 3-4 months now at least.
LG tv plexapp still seems to play fine. Other streaming platforms on the Shield play fine as well so this doesn’t point to a network issue.
It seems that plex cannot buffer enough content prior to playback, and doesn’t seem to buffer ahead on any playback, on 4k content anyway (no visible white buffer bar ahead of playback marker).
I have previously submitted debug logs which I’m not sure have been helpful or not.
Same issue here but only on Amazon Fire. Apple TV, Roku, and Web both on my network and outside my home network are fine.
How can this still be happening after so much time? I would argue that playing videos is basic functionality.
Now I’m looking into other media managers after having paid for a media manager that only plays videos if the weather is right.
At least we have fun new themes and a slicker UI to browse all those library items we can’t play.
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