Nvidia Shield having trouble playing videos from beginning/start

General Discussions
1

I have a Shield connected to a Mac Mini running PMS – recently the shield has refused to play movies, seemingly randomly, from the beginning – giving an error that there is a problem connecting to the server. We discovered that all you need to do is skip forward a bit and it plays fine. It is only when playing from the beginning. What could be causing something like this?

We haven’t seen this using any other clients in the house (phones, computers, Roku) and the Shield is hardwired with ethernet so it’s not a wireless problem.

Thanks –

2

sounds like an issue with transcoder initiating on server. maybe taking to long for first chunk to get to shield. ( just a guess ) Is it direct playing or transcoding? Shield is my primary client as well and server on a Mac Mini also. I have never had that happen to me

3

I don’t think it would be transcoding… should be direct play. Here is part of the log file where it fails… I just really don’t know how to read this other than I can see the “Broken pipe” error.

Jun 27, 2017 15:30:30.652 [0x7000008c4000] DEBUG - Failed to stream media, client probably disconnected: 32 - Broken pipe

correction: it is playing this particular file (mkv) in direct stream mode – not sure of the Shield has trouble with MKV or what

4

I’ve narrowed this down to a problem with direct stream like you thought BigWheel. When using the Plex client on Nvidia Shield it plays everything as Direct Stream… not sure why, but maybe it is just a limitation of the client.

When I use the plex add-on for Kodi everything is Direct Play and I do not experience this problem.

So I guess the solution is to just use Kodi instead, but my family likes the Plex app a lot more – they say it is easier.

5

You log actually indicates the file was trying to use direct play on the file. However, you cut off the beginning of the log. Please post the entire log file.

6

Ok, attached is a full log. Below is the sequence of events I took in generating this. Also there is a pre-roll video clip that plays before each attempt and I just skip over it so you will see that in the logs too. Interestingly it worked the first time – dont know why.

  1. Play movie from beginning, skip pre-roll, started playing successfully. Hit Stop
  2. Play movie from beginning, skip pre-roll, failed with “Cannot contact server”. Hit Retry. Stuck with a spinning loading graphic for over a minute, hit B to cancel.
  3. Play move from beginning, skip pre-roll, failed with “Cannot contact server”.