I am unsure how to post a problem and so chose this method. I am not a techy and have no idea what most of what I’ve been reading means. Anyway when I moved into my senior’s home in 2017 my son-in-law installed Plex to permit showing photos, music and movies stored on my desktop computer on my new Samsung Smart TV. It worked beautifully till last fall. My son-in-law visited and made no effort to correct the problem but brought along a REKU box that he insisted would do wonders for me. The only benefit I saw was it permitted Plex to once again work. I complained that I found the ROKU box a nuisance and could I not just get back to selecting Plex right right off my TV. He said he thought Samsung must have done a change to their software causing the problem, but he said he had an even better solution than ROKU and he bought me a KODY box. Now I can again watch my movies and listen to my music but the KODY box is even more cumbersome to use. I would just like to be able to again use Plex simply by selecting the HOME option on the TV. Back to the original problem… I can view all my photos. It’s only the movies and music that doesn’t work. The TV screen shows all there is to view e.g. with my music, the mini image of the record label I stored with the meta data, along with title and artist, but when I select play I get "An unexpected playback error has occurred". I should mention that everything works perfectly well if I run Plex on the desktop computer’s terminal screen, it only occurs with the Samsung TV. My solution initially, before calling my son-in-law was to upgrade to PlexMediaServer-1.24.5.5173-8dcc73a59-x86. That didn’t help When I got fed-up with ROKU, I updated to PlexMediaServer-1.25.2.5319-c43dc0277-x86 hoping it would correct the problem but it didn’t. Today I decided to see if anyone on the forum had a suggestion, but before writing this I updated again to PlexMediaServer-1.25.3.5409-f11334058-x86 and then tried the TV to see if there was a change. There wasn’t. Can anyone help as I really prefer the simplicity of selecting Plex right from the TV?
I took the liberty to move this post in its own thread as it wasn’t related to that other thread.
There’s indeed been a change on a range of smart TVs. Or actually it wasn’t so much a change but the lack of an update for a critical component. Computers (and as such, smart TVs) use “certificates” to establish secure connections between devices. Those security certificates establish which devices to trust or not… when those smart TV vendors no longer updated an expired certificate, this has been causing Plex to no longer work if a secure connection is required.
This can be bypassed – however it’ll require both the server and the smart TV to be configured to disable secure connections. Not all server owners want that.
Now… I wonder if that’s actually been the problem with your Samsung TV.
Given you can still access your server and only have issues playing the media (but browsing through your library is fine)… this sounds like there might be a different problem.
To help troubleshooting this problem… could you double-check which version of the Plex app is installed on your Samsung TV? If I remember correctly, the version should be listed in the app’s settings section.
Thank you for your quick reply. I finally find something here in the forum that I can basically understand what is being said. However, your request to provide
“which version of the Plex app is installed on your Samsung TV?” has me perplexed (pardon the pun.) All I aware of is that the Plex app is stored upon my PC, and I downloaded and installed the latest update only yesterday. The PC is then simply connected to the TV via a cable. I’m not aware how one could go about installing anything on the TV. I am unsure, but I think that the cable goes into a junction box that my son-in-law brought, along with the TV cable company’s output and is then fed into the TV. Is there any significance in that Plex works fine when showing a movie or music on my computer monitor which is an old Hannspree 26" flat screen TV, or also plays fine when I used ROKU and selected Plex from its screen? By the way, my Samsung TV was bought new when I moved into my senior’s residence and than was June 2017.
Just gave further thought to your final remark, “If I remember correctly, the version should be listed in the app’s settings section.”
Went on PC, opened Plex and checked settings. I believe what you requested is: Version 1.25.3.5409
Does that help? Currently the Plex app, under “Allow Fallback to Insecure Connections” shows Always. Regarding the suggestion about insecure connection on the server, I think I will refer to my son-in-law. I don’t think it is an issue as he set me up with my own private WIFI so my computer would not be open to others using the residence’s WIFI, by whom I get my internet connection. However, you seemed to suggest that the nature of my problem is not related to secure or insecure.
There’s different ways to access the content of a Plex Media Server. The server installed on your PC is only “dispatching” the media to those different endpoints.
Most Samsung models offer an app that will run on the TV itself to access your content.
Some users are running a dedicated player on a PC that’s connected to their TV – this is usually called a HTPC setup (“Home Theater PC”).
I’m not exactly sure what approach you have setup on your environment.
That leaves us mostly to (more or less) educated guesses.
Tom. Thank you for your continued interest in my problem. To the best of my understanding, my setup is as follows. My senior’s residence provides an internet outlet on each side of the wall shared between my bedroom and living room. As I understand it, this connection is shared by all the units in the building. In order to keep my PC private, the outlet in the living room is fed into a modem. One outlet of the modem is then passed back through the wall with an ethernet cable to my PC, and a 2nd output is fed to the Samsung TV also using ethernet cable. The Samsung’s internet connection can be wireless but my son-in-law says using the ethernet cable is preferable. That is how he set it up when I moved in in 2017 and Plex worked perfectly until last fall. The only other change to this setup was made as part of my recent Christmas present of the KODY box. He removed my 8tb hard drive from the PC and installed it in a NAS box along with a 2nd 8tb drive that he gave. Hopefully that may clarify your educated guesses. I intend contacting Samsung’s tech support and find what they have to say.
This is the substance of my reply from Samsung:
“Samsung TVs has no server restrictions or access to block the apps/playing contents and the above picture shows it’s a playback error which is unsupported content. we can update the firmware for the TVs only if we have new firmware update available as there are no certificates for the TV or any third party apps to do from Samsung because we have no access/right to update any third party apps.”
I took a look at other posts under this topic. It seems dozens of folk have complains relating to Samsung and LG TVs that go back to last September. They all are complaining how slow it now is watching a video. I wonder if my problem is perhaps an extension of theirs in that everything is as it always was until I select PLAY. Then, I get the buffering circle for about 45 seconds and then it seems to give up trying and shows the “an unexpected error has occurred.” An interesting problem that I learned after changing to the “prefer unsecured” and “unsecured” suggestion is that I tried viewing one of the free PLEX movies and I got the same result.
Thanks Tom. I guess that’s exactly what my son-in-law concluded was the only solution to the problem and so he bought me the KODY box which doesn’t rely upon Plex at all. Unfortunately, rather like the new smart phones, they provide so much more capabilities that they become beyond the ken of us older folk. I just can’t get used to the complexity of KODY or that it requires another remote control. I also don’t fully understand the technicalities that related to the ROKU box he previously installed, as from within it I still had to select PLEX in order to listen to my music or watch the movies stored upon my computer. Yet, that method then worked fine. Its trouble was simply that it caused more steps to achieve and also required a 2nd remote.
Anyway, I seem to be stuck in that Plex suggests the problem is with Samsung and Samsung responding with it’s not possible. They point to the fact that my Samsung TV is obviously capable to connecting to Plex, but that there must be a problem within Plex itself that’s preventing play. Furthering that thought led me to think that I have no problem viewing the photos from my computer, which are all in jpg format, it’s only music (in mp3 format) and videos (mp4 format) that don’t play. In fact, somewhere in the last couple of days I must have changed something on Plex as now when I try to listen to music or play a video, instead of the “unexpected error has occurred” message, I now get “Playback Error - Multimedia file format not supported” as the error. I find only one place when I logon to Plex that refers to file format. Being a non techie I don’t know what it means. Down the left side of the online plex site there is a category "DLNA’ and an item within it is “DLNA Server Description Icons” that presently shows “png,jpg;260x260, 120x120,48x48”. Could it be that mp3 and mp4 should be added?
Better don’t mess with the DLNA config. There’s only pain down that road 
As for your playback problem… can you please do the following:
- Open your Plex Server (e.g. https://app.plex.tv/desktop or http://[Plex Media Server IP address]:32400/web)
- Go to
Settings>[Server Name]>Generaland enable/checkEnable Plex Media Server debug logging(but keepEnable Plex Media Server verbose loggingdisabled!!) - Go to your Samsung and try playing a movie and wait approx. 1 min after you got the error message
- In the Plex Web app, go to
Settings>[Server Name]>Manage>Troubleshootingand click onDownload Logs - Add the resulting zip-file as a response into this thread.
Maybe those logs show what might be causing this.
Interestingly the message has gone back to the original error message… Perhaps that’s because the other error message was because I was trying to play an mp3 song.
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-01-29_15-42-13.zip (3.2 MB)
Hopefully this helps.l
Your logs are showing a lot of errors.
Many of them seem to be related to your server failing to access your media (all of them related to drive M:\ → NAS-Music and `NAS-TV). That could be part of the problem.
I can see the spot where you attempt to start streaming a video on your Samsung. From the looks of it there seems to be indeed an issue with the TV’s “root certificate” causing Plex to fail establishing a secure connection.
I wonder what’ll happen if you configure both your server and the TV app to go with an insecure connection?
Odd that it even refers to NAS-Music and NAS-TV in that to create the log, I only went to NAS-Movies. I believe at your earlier suggestion I had already changed both to INSECURE with no change to the outcome. Anyway, this time I tried to play a TV show and also a Music selection, both with logging.
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-01-27_14-36-03.zip (4.9 MB)
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