I’m having the same issue.
Playback error on Plex Web with the error message “An error occured loading items to play”.
And on Android and iOs devices I have the error message: “Error Occurred: Failed to fetch play queue response”
On nVidia Shield, however, playback works fine.
Has anyone been able to fix this yet?
Same issue, no fix yet.
It’s comforting to know it’s an issue others are having.
Does your server report when you are streaming on your Nvidia shield?
Yes, the item that I start to stream shows up in the Plex Media Server.log. I have also tested Plex HTPC and the older Plex Media Player now, and both also respond with errors. For some reason nVidia Shield is the only player that still works fine as nothing happened.
When you are streaming to your shield, can you see under your Plex dashboard that anything is currently playing?
I am getting the same issue from my unraid plex server across all my devices: Samsung TV’s, LG TV, Roku, Chromecast as well. using plexinc/pms-docker:1.41.8.9834-071366d65.
I am now getting this since yesterday. “An error occurred loading items to play.” on all playback, and nothing auto-plays. Some TV I’m able to manually select the episode and it will play, but the Plex server is unaware of anything being played. Movies are a no-go. The plex logs when I try to play a movie are only DEBUG statements and no errors:
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.139 [139644861074232] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.102:55610 (Subnet)] GET /web/static/b38a559594ac52d049ba.png (9 live) #3bfc7 GZIP Signed-in
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.140 [139644861074232] DEBUG - [Req#3bfc7] Final path: “/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-46083195d/WebClient.bundle/Contents/Resources/static/b38a559594ac52
d049ba.png”
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.140 [139644861074232] DEBUG - Content-Length of /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Resources/Plug-ins-46083195d/WebClient.bundle/Contents/Resources/static/b38a559594ac52d049ba.
png is 54413 (of total: 54413).
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.140 [139644963478328] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.102:55610] 200 GET /web/static/b38a559594ac52d049ba.png (9 live) #3bfc7 GZIP 0ms 54413 bytes (pipelined: 1)
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.149 [139644861074232] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.102:55604 (Subnet)] POST /playQueues?type=video&extrasPrefixCount=0&uri=server%3A%2F%2Fbc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046
c960fff51821%2Fcom.plexapp.plugins.library%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F442335&repeat=0&own=1&includeChapters=1&includeMarkers=1&includeGeolocation=1&includeExternalMedia=1 (9 live) #3bcc0 TLS G
ZIP Signed-in Token (praeluceo)
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.149 [139644861074232] DEBUG - [Req#3bcc0] PlayQueue: Converted ‘server://bc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046c960fff51821/com.plexapp.plugins.library/library/metadata/442335’
to ‘library://x/item/%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F442335’
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.152 [139644861074232] DEBUG - [Req#3bcc0] PlayQueue: Start index: 0 End index: 0 Count: 1
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.153 [139644861074232] ERROR - Got exception from request handler: std::exception
Jul 15, 2025 12:15:08.153 [139644965587768] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.102:55604] 500 POST /playQueues?type=video&extrasPrefixCount=0&uri=server%3A%2F%2Fbc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046c96
0fff51821%2Fcom.plexapp.plugins.library%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F442335&repeat=0&own=1&includeChapters=1&includeMarkers=1&includeGeolocation=1&includeExternalMedia=1 (9 live) #3bcc0 TLS GZIP
4ms 538 bytes (pipelined: 1)
May I have the entire ZIP file please ?
These errors cannot be diagnosed from snippets.
I think I know what’s happening but need the full logs to give to Engineering so they can confirm and fix it.
@ChuckPa Here are my zip file logs. I tried to playback using Plex Web and Plex on Android right before downloading the logs.
Plex Media Server Logs_2025-07-16_09-08-44.zip (4.9 MB)
Plex Media Server is running on an Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS server.
Thank you for the logs. You captured the problem exactly where I expected it.
Please confirm what happened ?
Great to hear!
I assume you mean the movie/tv series thumbnail image and background? Yes, everything loads correctly and appear normal when I go to a movie or tv series episode.
But when I click the Play button, I get the error messages I described in a previous post. When I close the error message nothing else happens, and I remain on the page of the movie or tv series episode I tried to play.
Thank you!
That is the smoking gun I need.
For future reference, you can turn off VERBOSE logging.
It doesn’t help us unless we’re tracking mouse clicks or other deep actions.
The biggest problem is that it’s TOO verbose.
Fantastic! Looking forward to the fix.
Verbose turned off. 
If I may impose one more time?
Can you please tell me the details on how to reproduce this?
I’ve tried reproducing here on Apple devices, AFTKA, and Shield (all forced transcoding) to no avail.
Anything you can tell me will help me / Engineering to reproduce it reliably.
No worries!
I checked my terminal command logs to remember what I did the day I noticed the Plex error (June 26th). I can’t be certain any of these actually caused it, but Plex worked fine not long before.
First I ran an update of Plex from v 1.41.8.9834 to 1.41.9.9912. For the records, I tried updating it to 1.41.9.9917 some days later to see if the problem was fixed.
Then I copied a new TV series episode to the media folder, but named the file wrong, and it was not picked up automatically by the scanner since it didn’t match season and episode on tvdb.
I ran library scan on the TV series library, and when that wasn’t successful, I deleted the contents in the Plug-in Support/Caches folder (I kept a backup first that I still have). After these uneccessary attempts, I noticed I had named the file wrong and it was picked up by the automatic scanner after I corrected the filename.
Then I tried to play the episode, which failed with the playback error. And here we are!
Which device(s) can you replicate this problem on? Apple (which ones), Android (which ones), others ?
I can replicate on the following devices: Plex Web, Apple iPhone 14 and iPad Mini 6 (iOS 18.5), Google Pixel 8 (Android 15), Huawei MediaPad M3 (Android 7) and Plex HTPC on Windows 11.
For some reason Plex shows my libraries as offline on the Huawei MediaPad M3 (internet works fine on the device) I’m not sure it’s related to this problem. The libraries are online on all other devices.
I’m late to the party, but I can reproduce on web, Google TV, Android Phone, and the nvidia Shield. I redid all scans, performed a vacuum; and reindex;, rebooted and made sure all disk space was fine. Everything on the interface loads fine, but TV and movies do not play or show as playing in Plex/Plex Dash. I -can- play some episodes of TV if I manually select that episode on Google TV, but maybe that’s because the files are cached on the projector?
I turned on verbose debugging, attempted to play a single movie, and then turned it off, and am attaching that Plex Media Server.log file here.
Plex Media Server.log.2025-07-17.tar.gz (739.6 KB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2025-07-17_11-21-16.zip (5.0 MB)
Here are the full logs, not just that one file, downloaded from the web interface, it’ll have a few more playback attempts than that first single log file, but may have content I was missing.
EDIT:
I also tried incrementally downgrading from the current latest PMS release back to lexmediaserver_1.41.4.9463 and each release backward showed the same problem, despite those releases working previously. So that’s odd and frustrating as well, and I’m not sure since the database looks clean, and the old servers now no-longer work, what happened exactly? @ChuckPa could you help shine some light into the source of the issue? It seems that PMS is failing to connect to itself, I’m not using docker or anything, and it just fails to serve up any data.
ALL:
When you look at PMS DEBUG logs, this is what the failure looks like:
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.589 [140073792060216] ERROR - Got exception from request handler: std::exception
It’s in this type of sequence at start of playback.
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.708 [140073804319544] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8e/PhotoTranscoder] Request for url [/library/metadata/439239/art/1734835726] (is local: 1 upscaled: 0)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.714 [140073938377528] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58262] 200 GET /library/sections/15/prefs (16 live) #7bc99 TLS GZIP 9ms 3821 bytes (pipelined: 9)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.714 [140073804319544] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8e/PhotoTranscoder/Req#7bc9b] Calculated media file path for path [metadata://art/tv.plex.agents.series_3cbec6eee5b6a1689520d95e5671b0022d8f1c9c]: ["/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/TV Shows/3/5e1fc7c7a423a9221ac2f50b7a8a63ac59bce09.bundle/Contents/_combined/art/tv.plex.agents.series_3cbec6eee5b6a1689520d95e5671b0022d8f1c9c"]
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.715 [140073804319544] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8e/PhotoTranscoder] Calling back into ourselves for photo to transcode, optimizing the process (status: -1)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.717 [140073804319544] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8e/PhotoTranscoder] Photo cache obtained 220790 bytes from /library/metadata/439239/art/1734835726
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.754 [140073792060216] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.108:58288 (Subnet)] GET /library/metadata/439239/grandchildren (16 live) #7bc90 TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (praeluceo)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.755 [140073786698552] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.108:58272 (Subnet)] GET /library/metadata/439239 (16 live) #7bc9a TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (praeluceo)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.764 [140073786698552] DEBUG - There were 1 top-level paths for 3-2-1 Penguins!.
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.764 [140073938377528] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58272] 200 GET /library/metadata/439239 (16 live) #7bc9a TLS GZIP 9ms 1963 bytes (pipelined: 10)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.791 [140073938377528] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58288] 200 GET /library/metadata/439239/grandchildren (16 live) #7bc90 TLS GZIP 36ms 5480 bytes (pipelined: 3)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.882 [140073786698552] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.108:58330 (Subnet)] GET /photo/:/transcode?width=1280&height=1280&format=jpeg&url=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439239%2Fart%2F1745391943 (16 live) #7bc8f TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (praeluceo)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.882 [140073786698552] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8f/PhotoTranscoder] Request for url [/library/metadata/439239/art/1745391943] (is local: 1 upscaled: 0)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.886 [140073786698552] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8f/PhotoTranscoder/Req#7bca0] Calculated media file path for path [metadata://art/tv.plex.agents.series_3cbec6eee5b6a1689520d95e5671b0022d8f1c9c]: ["/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/TV Shows/3/5e1fc7c7a423a9221ac2f50b7a8a63ac59bce09.bundle/Contents/_combined/art/tv.plex.agents.series_3cbec6eee5b6a1689520d95e5671b0022d8f1c9c"]
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.886 [140073786698552] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8f/PhotoTranscoder] Calling back into ourselves for photo to transcode, optimizing the process (status: -1)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.886 [140073786698552] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8f/PhotoTranscoder] Photo cache obtained 220790 bytes from /library/metadata/439239/art/1745391943
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.902 [140073804319544] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8e/PhotoTranscoder] Created thumbnail of size 1280x720, has pixels: 1
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:08.956 [140073938377528] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58318] 200 GET /photo/:/transcode?width=1280&height=1280&format=jpeg&url=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439239%2Fart%2F1734835726 (16 live) #7bc8e TLS GZIP 248ms 138562 bytes (pipelined: 3)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:09.092 [140073786698552] DEBUG - [Req#7bc8f/PhotoTranscoder] Created thumbnail of size 1280x720, has pixels: 1
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:09.145 [140073940486968] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58330] 200 GET /photo/:/transcode?width=1280&height=1280&format=jpeg&url=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439239%2Fart%2F1745391943 (15 live) #7bc8f TLS GZIP 262ms 138562 bytes (pipelined: 6)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.574 [140073792060216] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.27.108:58262 (Subnet)] POST /playQueues?includeChapters=1&continuous=1&uri=server%3A%2F%2Fbc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046c960fff51821%2Fcom.plexapp.plugins.library%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439450&type=video&own=1&repeat=0&shuffle=0&includeMarkers=1&includeGeolocation=1&includeExternalMedia=1 (15 live) #7bc9c TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (praeluceo)
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.574 [140073792060216] DEBUG - [Req#7bc9c] PlayQueue: Converted 'server://bc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046c960fff51821/com.plexapp.plugins.library/library/metadata/439450' to 'library://x/item/%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439450'
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.587 [140073792060216] DEBUG - [Req#7bc9c] PlayQueue: Start index: 0 End index: 22 Count: 23
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.589 [140073792060216] ERROR - Got exception from request handler: std::exception
Jul 16, 2025 23:01:10.589 [140073938377528] DEBUG - Completed: [192.168.27.108:58262] 500 POST /playQueues?includeChapters=1&continuous=1&uri=server%3A%2F%2Fbc0d05013d557bc0f75e0e34f046c960fff51821%2Fcom.plexapp.plugins.library%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F439450&type=video&own=1&repeat=0&shuffle=0&includeMarkers=1&includeGeolocation=1&includeExternalMedia=1 (15 live) #7bc9c TLS GZIP 15ms 405 bytes (pipelined: 10)
The problem with this is:
PLEASE share any/all information you have about this so we can fix it
Would it assist if I shared an impacted library with you to at least see if the issue from an affected server reproduces on your side?
