I have been seeing this crop up for a few people and it finally bit me in the butt as well.
Funny thing is that on the plex server itself I could not play certain media through any browser. (Like 300, blues brothers, airforce once, etc)
On the Nvidia shield, I could not play those titles either. But on my phone, they were just fine.
I started to search, and most were pointing to a corrupted database. But since I was able to play my titles on my phone properly, that didn’t see to be the case.
So, I made a local account on my computer and named it test. Did a fresh install of plex on that account and brought in one of my libraries. To my surprise, the media I was having issue playing both on browsers and in Nvidia Sheild were playing just fine. First thought was, well maybe I do have a corrupted data base. But then I continued on and the first setting I changed in my server was the extras.
I can recreate this at any time. If someone can please fix this on why it is happening on certain titles, that would be great. If you want me to supply logs, I will be happy too. I am just glad I was able to find this and report it and hopefully this will help others that might come across the same thing.
revert the trailer settings to as they were before
Refresh Metadata of an affected title
wait 1–2 minutes
Bonus question: do you start your plex server only when you need it? Or in other words: does it actually have a chance to perform its nightly maintenance routine (i.e. it has to be awake and running during that time)
for any of my effected titles that was one of the first things I tried I to refresh the meta data. I also did an analyze and I even tried to remove the media and put it back. I did each of those three separelty. First refresh meta data, hit play, got error message, same step for analysis and remove media and put pack.
Always did a wait but before doing each from above. I usually wait a bit more then 1-2 minutes.
Bonus answer: plex server is always on. Maintenance on my machine start at 2am and goes to 7am.
To me what seems to be the issues is when plex is trying to grab trailer media from the net. If it doesn’t pull the link to play the clip, plex throws the error. Hence why when disable those options, I guess plex pulls trailers from media I have. Since that is already their, it can play it first before the movie. Hence giving no error. Like in my example air force one when reverting back does not play but if I would do alita battle angle no problem playing the media. I want to stress that when I revert back, all titles play fine on the plex phone app. The places where playback is effected is playing directly in browser on the physical plex server, playback from the plex app on nvidia sheild and also playback from a remote pc (in my house) through the web browser, plex app downloaded from the Microsoft store or even from the plex htpc app.
I can be even more detailed if you like but this is already turning into a novel.
