Plex Client No Longer Working on FireTV Cube/4K Stick

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 1.18.2.2058
Player Version#: 7.25.1.14216 (96f60a68) - FireTV Cube

I picked up a new FireTV Cube with the new Alexa remote during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales. It seems to be working for everything except Plex.

All attempts to play content - remuxed or ripped movies/TV, home videos, etc - all fail to start playing. The request to stream the content is seen by PMS on the dashboard but the amount of data being streamed starts at a lower than expected bitrate. After 30 - 40 seconds (as shown in the attached picture) the server doesn’t appear to send any data to the FireTV device and the FireTV Plex client remains on a black screen with no sound.

I was able to continue an episode of a TV show that was 3/4 finished but attempting to start the next episode fails with the same black screen mentioned above. I have confirmed the PMS is working by using Plex clients on my Apple TV 4K, LG TV and even via the web client. As a test I started playing a remux of ‘The American President’ on the web client on my MacBook Pro and it played fine.

I stopped it about 4 minutes in and attempted to resume watching on the FireTV (the app shows it as part of my ‘Continue Watching’ section). This time it grabbed the first frame of video at that time marker but again no playback or sound and data is only sent via PMS for about 40 secs.

I also own a FireTV Stick 4K and it continued to work fine initially. I noted that there was a new OS update for both the Cube and 4K Stick. I tried factory resetting the Cube and loading the latest OS update, then installing the Plex client. The same issue is now happening on the 4K Stick after I factory reset it and also loaded the latest OS update and Plex client.

Let me know if any logs are required and from where. My PMS is the Plex official Docker container running on unRAID 6.72 and as mentioned above, still works fine for the Apple TV 4K, the LG TV and the Plex web client. Any help/suggestions appreciated.

FireTVCubeError1
FireTVCubeError1761×657 90.3 KB

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Further troubleshooting reveals the issue to be related to the Audio Passthrough option. If passthrough (HDMI) is enabled, no content with DTS (-HD MA from 1.0 - DTS:X) works. Content with AC3/TrueHD/Atmos sound appear to work but I get video ‘glitches’ and breakup. Switching Audio Passthrough to disabled allows DTS content to play, but the audio is not being decoded by my receiver when configured like this.

At least disabling the Audio Passthrough appears to be a work-around, but I would prefer the native audio container get decoded by the receiver, not transcoded by Plex/FireTV device.

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I have a similar problem. Had the old FireTV Cube, everything worked great. New FireTV Cube, plex app wont play anything with HDMI pass thru. With hdmi pass thru disabled I can play some titles but as soon as I try to play certain titles that it wont play… the firetv wont play anything across any apps until I reboot it. It’s basically worthless.

1 Like
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I’m having the same issues and it sounds like many others are too. Has anyone found a full fix for this?

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