Server Version#: 1.25.8.5663
Player Version#: Web 4.69.1 / WebOS 5.35.1 / iOS 8.1
Hello, I am having some issues streaming content from my laptop (running the server) to my LG OLED55C9 TV while using my iPhone 12 Mini (runninng iOS 15.4.1) as a remote with the iOS Plex app.
The steps I take:
Start the server on my laptop
Open the Plex app on my TV
Open the Plex app on my phone
Click the “Cast” icon on my phone
Select my TV with the Plex for LG option, not the LDNA connection
Start a movie/TV show
The video starts playing on my TV, no issue there, no buffering or anything, it all plays smoothly
Click the power button on my phone to put it to sleep (I just leave the Plex app running in the background without force-closing it)
Wait for a few minutes (10-15)
Wake my phone up again
Go into the Plex app, try to interact with the video controls
They’re all unresponsive, my TV doesn’t seem to receive the commands
Try pausing the video or interacting with the playback controls on the actual TV app with my TV remote
Same thing there, the video just keeps playing and none of the controls are responsive
If I go into the phone app and use the cast menu to disconnect from the TV, and then try to connect again, it will just show a loading spinner that never ends
Oddly enough it seems that there is a way to get the TV controls to react with my remote by doing the following thing:
Use the arrow buttons to place the cursor on the control I want to use (pause button for example)
Press the “OK” button
Then scroll the wheel (I’m using an LG Magic Remote with a scrollable and clickable wheel)
At this point, the “OK” press from before gets registered and the video pauses
It seems when the TV client gets into this unresponsive state, all I can do it force quit the TV app and relaunch it. Also to note, it seems to happen a lot more with large/high bitrate files such as 4K movies. Although I don’t think it’s really a CPU issue on the server since my laptop’s fan never starts spinning up, the video playback remains nice and smooth the entire time, and the video controls (both from the phone app and with the TV remote) are both perfectly responsive for at least ~10 minutes until things start to break down.
Oh yep, based on the description in your other thread that seems to be the same issue. I just actually played a video again and kept it running for longer (~40 minutes), and the video playback on the TV eventually stops on its own, I assume because the TV app crashes.
Well, it could be that app does not crash at first. It just gets too much requests to handle, which slows the app tremendously and that’s why it does not respond to remote commands anymore.
Can you check your logs when this happens and try to notice any flood, recurrences in logs(like in my post)?
Here’s how to check real-time Logs in Web Browser:
Okay so I did another test. Replayed the same video (started from my phone via the cast feature) that was causing issues previously and this is what I got from it:
As long as I leave my phone alone, everything runs just fine, and the console shows around ~5 lines of log per second
If I pick my phone up and start opening some other apps, as soon as iOS kills Plex to reclaim some RAM, I start seeing a huge uptick in log messages and the unresponsive behaviour described in the initial post shows up
Then I assume the overwhelming amount of logs ends up crashing the TV app after another 20 minutes or so
I tried playing around with that too but couldn’t manage to make it happen, since the web app never really gets force-stopped the same way that the iOS app does. And closing the browser tab running the web app manually doesn’t seem to trigger this issue.
I could replicate this behaviour when casting from iOS, Android and Firefox, within first 3-4 minutes of video/music. There were couple rare moments when it worked fine for full movie, but after I played next one - same deal.
I really hope that Plex is working on this issue, since there was a response in my initial post from employee.
