Thanks for posting this. I’ve had the same or similar issue for months. It started on my 2017 Shield Pro and followed to my 2019 Shield Pro. I’ve only ever observed it happening with shorter kids shows, but with short playtimes it may just be more likely to show up. I can reliably recreate the issue by shuffling a series with 5 minute episodes and pressing next track every 10 seconds. Before long I get a black screen or frozen frame. The OSD controls still work and the dashboard shows the episode is playing.
This morning I watched the server log as it happened and I get dozens of messages of “we’re going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1” If I get different errors I’ll post them.
I was working around this by using Kodi just for kids shows but I’d really like to stay fully within Plex.
Yesterday I went into the settings on the Android app and disabled the “Enable new video player” setting under the “Advanced” category, and I haven’t seen this happen again since I did that.
edit
Ugggh. I spoke too soon, just saw it happen again while my kids were watching a series of short 1~ minute shows.
I have noticed I haven’t seen an update to the plex player in a while but several server updates. This issue is getting very frustrating. When I watch on my ipad I never have this issue, only when watching from my nvidia shield.
This has been a problem for a while for me, an episode reaches the end but playback continues with a black screen and muted from the beginning of the episode. I presume this is the reason why the episode then shows as unwatched.
Baffled why simple playback is something Plex seem to struggle so much with. The ingenious move to put playback options into the play screen instead of the media selection screen means that media conversion options are completely inaccessible if you are experiencing playback problems.
My issue just keeps getting worse. The updates to the Plex server on the shield have not helped at all. Makes watching TV series very unenjoyable since it will not start the next episode ever. I have to close out and then go manually select the next episode every single time now.
I noticed I could press the pause button to bring up the controls menu, then use the “skip forward” button to go to the next episode. It’s still annoying as hell, but at least that’s an easier work-around than having to go back and then select the next episode. Personally though I’ve moved onto Emby, which has been WAY more stable than Plex over the last month or so.
I’d like to see a recent log from the latest version of the Android app.
Here you go. I enabled network logging and then started “season 1” of some 2~ minute long kids shows. The first two played fine, then it froze before starting the 3rd one.
And just for good measure here’s some more logs since it froze again once it got to maybe the 6th or 7th show in the season. plex_freezing_android-2.txt (742.7 KB)
@CodeCat5 Both of those logs are from PMS. I need the log from the app.
I see where playback is stopping. It shows that it reached the end of the file while the video was playing and so it stopped. Around 11 minutes into the episode. That sound like what you saw?
