Server Version#: 1.41.3.9314
Player Version#: 10.24.1.2319
I just bought an Nvidia Shield, and I have been running into some really showstopping differences between this version of the player app and what is on my Samsung TV.
Some background first: I use my plex server strictly in the house. It is not accessible from the outside. It is set up so that devices on my local network do not require auth. The server has been set up that way for as long as I can remember. I use it primarily to play playlists of TV shows and movies in the background while I work and sleep. I suffer from tinnitus from years of adolescent concert-going without ear protection, so I need the noise.
MOST of these issues have to do with playlist playback:
- I CANNOT get this thing to play more than 3 episodes. This is a HUGE issue for me. I want to go to a playlist that I have made, and play it on shuffle until I stop it. On my TV this was not an issue. If I started a playlist, it would play for as long as there was content, sometimes days at a time.
- Clicking on an item in a playlist does not start the playlist playing, instead it just goes to the show page, which if I hit play from THERE, will just play THAT show and will ignore the rest of the shows in the playlist I was trying to play.
- Going back to the playlist from the show page I just mistakenly clicked into does not return me to the same place in the list, it returns me to the top of the list, so if I had spent 30 second scrolling down the list, that’s now 30 seconds I will never get back. This one is not critical, just annoying, but I thought I’d mention it.
- Going back to the playlist from the show page seems to “break” playlist mode. The options at the top of the playlist change from “Play”, “Shuffle” and “More” to “Play”, “Add Show to Watchlist”, “Mark as Watched”, “Share” and “More”. Shuffle is not there anymore, and the only way to get back into “playlist” mode is to exit the playlist and re-enter it. This clearly is a bug.
- If I pause the player to take a phone call or zoom meeting, it will turn the TV off after a few minutes. The TV version has an actual SCREENSAVER.
- I want to make sure the Shield player can access the server in the event of an internet outage. As I mentioned, I have the server set up so that local devices do not need auth. In the TV version of the player app, I had to enter the IP/port of the server before it would work when teh internet went out. There is no place for this in the Shield version of the app. I have been told on reddit that as long as I have the local network mask set on the SERVER, that the Shield should have no problem connecting when the internet is out, but I am very skeptical. is this really the case? I’d test but we have 3 people here who all work from home and are avid gamers, unforced internet outages are a no-no.
To me, these issues have watered down the playlist functionality to be unusable, and I do not understand the need for these restrictions without ways to circumvent them. What do they think they are preventing here? This is MY hardware, MY media, MY network and MY power. Let me use it how I need it.
If these are PLATFORM restrictions, how was this platform even considered for a player app?
