I have a Hisense Android TV. Plex app is current and this issue is persistent across several updates.
When watching live TV, I get recurring halts of the playback with a brief spinner. Audio and video go out of sync. If I turn on nerd stats, I can see that it is regularly dropping frames. This occurs even if the “live” stream is 30 minutes or more behind the actual live show, although backing up a bit usually cures it - but only briefly.
If I watch the very same recording as a recording (i.e. the show has finished,) no such behavior happens, it plays back smoothly. Same behavior has occurred with two different servers - one linux box and one mac mini. I can watch the same live TV stream on my phone simultaneously with no issues on the phone even as it chokes on the TV, and over the same Wifi from the same room with the same signal quality, so I feel reasonably sure it’s a problem with the client app on the android TV rather than the server or the network.
It may play back smoothly for quite some time, but once it starts this stuttering, it’s generally there to stay. Stopping and restarting the app does not solve it. Even rebooting the TV doesn’t stop it.
From nerd stats, I see that during poor performance, it’s playing MPEG2TS/HLS. When I watch the recording, it is only MPEG2TS. This is the only difference I can find between the two modes, aside from the recording using slightly more bandwidth than the live stream as well.
I believe that Plex’s HLS live stream handling is causing the issue. I couldn’t find a way to disable it, though.
I tried turning on “Transcode while recording” for the DVR. This seems to improve playback somewhat, although it still shows that it is MPEG2TS/HLS.
Are you talking pauses of way less than a second? Less than the time for the spinner to even fully show up, rather the image gets the black opaque overlay and maybe a tiny slither of the spinner? If so I’ve seen a similar thing, though I haven’t dug into the stats - I’ve generally just assumed it was my network/set-up.
Fwiw I have a Sony Google TV, Synology NAS with native Plex server and HDHomeRun terrestrial antenna TV tuner; I’m in the UK
Yeah that sounds about right. Sometimes just a pause. But it repeats frequently and the payback slowly falls behind real-time.
I made similar assumptions but finally got annoyed enough with it to dig into it. I’m reasonably confident at this point it’s not the network or the server, which leaves the app on the tv.
I’m in the US, also using hd homerun.
FWIW I haven’t seen the problem since turning on “transcode while recording.”
Well, it came back in version 1.41.7.9823. Worse than ever. Live TV is effectively unusable, though the recordings it makes work fine once they’re complete. Watching "from start’ while recording has the same issue as watching live.
Actually, I tried backing up to versions 1.41.8.9834, 1.41.5.9522, and finally 1.41.6.9685 which is what I was running before that was working fine. All show exactly the same problem. Also, there are no hardware changes in the client, server, or network since it was working fine.
Based on this I think it’s likely the Android TV client that is the root cause rather than the server side.
I deleted the client app and reinstalled it. Lo and behold, it works again. I don’t know if perhaps that changed the version, or if it helped in some other way.
