I have to assume that it has capabilities similar to a regular 'ole smartphone… surely?
I just want to pitch in here by saying that in my experience, these things really seem to vary from client to client.
For example, I used to use Plex on the Playstation 3, but it was a (slow) mess. I’m talking minutes to load large sections. Plex claims that it is because Sony does only allow them a small fraction of the Playstations capabilities. I guess a smart TV can have similar snags, but it’s just guessing on my part. Or the “app” itself is simply programmed in a worse way than (as you mention) the Android app.
I have an “album” in my music library that contains almost 5000 songs. If I try to “enter” this album in Plex Web to see the tracks, the browser will freeze up for about 2-3 minutes, and even sometimes crash. However if I open the album on Android, all is well. Despite my computer being obviously more powerful than android. All I’m saying is that “power” doesn’t seem to be a part of this, but rather how the apps themselves are built. Just my two cents.
@d2freak said:
All I’m saying is that “power” doesn’t seem to be a part of this, but rather how the apps themselves are built. Just my two cents.
That just reinforces the idea that improvements are warranted. I’ve had similar experiences using the Roku player too.
@Froberg said:
@d2freak said:
All I’m saying is that “power” doesn’t seem to be a part of this, but rather how the apps themselves are built. Just my two cents.That just reinforces the idea that improvements are warranted.
Yes definitely.
Btw the dots issue can happen if you use a non-default zoom level on Plex Web. Maybe that’s it.
Also, perhaps you have already thought about this, but as a workaround for when the guests are over, can’t you cast from Plex Web to your TV? I do this sometimes if a client misbehaves for whatever reason, browsing wise. Obviously we shouldn’t have to do stuff like that, but yeah. At least then you can put on any album, with “only” a 5 second delay, right?
Aye, that’s true. I’ve had issues with casting being unreliable in the past, and the playlist dropping or the client crashing… but I haven’t tested it for a while. I’ll try it next time.
@Froberg said:
I feel the need to defend myself a bit, no three nots visible.
I tried to reproduce this and write up a Plex/Web issue to submit for the missing “***” .
I tried FireFox and Chrome. I zoomed to maximum (300% for FireFox and 500% for Chrome). I shrunk to minimum ( FF to 30% and Chrome to 33%).
I could not reproduce your error.
Can you help me reproduce it?
I was just using edge with default settings. Maybe it’s a linux-server variant thing? Not using any particular zoom settings, either.
It’s fine, I am aware of it now. Just didn’t notice it previously.
Now, I’ve tested the app-remote features, and it’s impossible to use. When connecting to the TV it’ll drop the connection when attempting to play music. But only music. I tried starting a movie and that worked fine and didn’t drop the connection, either.
Attempting to start a music track once the movie was running just did… nothing… Playback never started.
Then the connection was dropped.
The TV displayed, ever so briefly, a warning about the server being on a different subnet. It seemed to list my public IP for some reason.
Surely the TV should be able to see the server as a local unit? Both are on wired connections and I am not using different subnets, either. Sadly the screen comes up very briefly, so I didn’t manage to read much more than that.
Note this only happens when attempting to cast content from my mobile phone to the TV.
I didn’t even have WiFi on my phone enabled, but I had to enable it to even see the TV. But I thought the TV would be castable so long as I was logged in to my plex account from both places.
This was a very expensive TV when I got it… is it just that LG webOS is THAT bad? The Roku device worked equally poorly.
Went back and re-tested on the Roku. I can browse the directory on the roku, album art stops displaying at some point, but I can live with that.
It does not, however, let me use my android as a remote for the Roku, it simply doesn’t pop up. It’s a roku 3, so maybe an upgrade is warranted.
@Froberg said:
I didn’t even have WiFi on my phone enabled, but I had to enable it to even see the TV. But I thought the TV would be castable so long as I was logged in to my plex account from both places.
Not that it helps, I guess, but I can confirm this happens for me as well. Highly annoying. It seems to be intended behavior too. I read a post once from a Plex dev who explained that it’s supposed to work like that. I’m just saying this to confirm it’s not something wrong with your particular setup (regarding this).
About dropping connection, I get that too on OpenPHT and RasPlex (only clients I cast to), although it will randomly drop in and out and only sometimes drop completely. Just saying this could be a general problem, although your case seems more extreme. In my case, if it happens, i can just connect it again.
About the fact that it only happens with music is really strange. How many albums under “Various Artists” do you have? It’s purely out of interest I ask. It must be some obscene number. I have 91 and it’s no problem at all.
The album with 5000 tracks I talked about earlier, exhibits some of what you speak of also - in OpenPHT the album (and tracklist) loads but refuses to show the cover art. I never thought much about it until you said similar things happened with your big list of compilation albums. Perhaps we are hitting some limit in the server itself?
About the Roku 3 - if it does not appear, it has something to do with the network so an upgrade would most likely not help. Again, I remember the client sadly needs to be on the same network.
Have you tried rebuilding your database or letting Plex optimize it? If the connection drops when you try play something, I guess it could mean that the database is choking a bit? And, out of curiosity, how many tracks in total do you have if you don’t mind me asking? I mean I have 170k tracks (which I’d like to believe is quite a lot) and I have been overall amazed over how responsive Plex is when handling that.
170,000 tracks is a great deal.
The test TV library is 88,000 episodes (796 series) and that’s ‘huge’
@d2freak said:
Have you tried rebuilding your database or letting Plex optimize it? If the connection drops when you try play something, I guess it could mean that the database is choking a bit? And, out of curiosity, how many tracks in total do you have if you don’t mind me asking? I mean I have 170k tracks (which I’d like to believe is quite a lot) and I have been overall amazed over how responsive Plex is when handling that.
Yeah I was forced to rebuild the library because it doesn’t detect changes properly. Recently I added another album as “Various” rather than “Various Artists”. Obviously this was a mistake on my part during the ripping process. I corrected the issue and the library still refuses to update. Prior to this it had decided to add an artist like AC/DC twice for each album.
It’s still behaving oddly, the music part. This all despite a complete re-analysis, re-index and emptying of trash.
41310 tracks across 606 ‘artists’
As for my VA section, it’s about a third of my collection - roughly 1500 albums.
Re-added my music library yesterday to resolve the issues above. I am now unable to play music entirely using either Roku or the TV client.
Phone still works, as does Plex Web.
I’m at a loss.
Something tells me when the ‘socket’ issue is solved, this is going to ‘magically’ resolve itself knowing how the agents talk to PMS and the outside world to get all the metadata, build the library, and playback.
Any idea how I’d go about that? So far it seems it works better outside of my network than inside for some incredibly weird reason…
Whoa, that makes no sense.
let’s dissect LAN vs WAN.
WAN is purely TCP/IP over your externally published port. All external discovery is through Plex.tv. All communication is receive/reply over a port.
Locally there is the UDP discovery process plus other LAN traffic. Wifi? TCP to 32400 locally is still the same. UDP discovery can get dropped by TCP traffic during times of congestion.
Anything start to ring a bell?
I am saying performance is flawless over a phone using only mobile data. However, the Roku on Wifi and the TV on a cabled connection both exhibit problems.
During testing earlier, the tv even said that the media I was trying to play didn’t exist.
Oddly nothing is wrong with tv shows, movies or anything else.
The plot thickens… I went to delete my old music library, since it refused to update to reflect the changes - which crashed plex. The service was still running, mind, but it became unresponsive. (Like in the other thread, Chuck 
) - once restarted the old library was gone. I then emptied the trash and set it to optimize, which has just crashed it again.
Since the logs may be pertinent, I’ve attached them here.
