It took me about an hour to calm down after I found the solution. I installed Plex a year ago on my Amazon Fire TVs (I have 4). I never got around to really using Plex until a month ago when I realized I could setup the server on my Synology NAS.
I started messing with the player on my office Fire TV and it was fine. My front room TV, the one we all watch/use all the time - It was a disaster. It was slow, would close randomly. Finally I cleared the cache, the data and then removed the Plex Player and reinstalled it. Still didn’t help. This morning my wife was commenting that Friendly TV was slow last night and she was seeing a progress circle frequently and the video would pause. SO, I decided to UNPLUG my front room Fire TV for 30 seconds. When it booted back up it complained that the USB Drive wasn’t available. I tried to run Plex and it said that Plex was on the USB drive. I was like…….. WTX! I installed a 256gb USB drive on all the TVs a long time ago and forgot about them.
Here’s what happened!
I had the AutoOffload setting to ON, so after not using Plex player for a long time, the “TV” moved Plex to the USB drive and has been trying to run it from there. I uninstalled Plex and gave the USB drives the “handheld sledgehammer” treatment—strictly to “save space in the trash can,” of course, and reinstalled Plex Player.
Works perfect now. Fast, no buffering and my wife was happy to see it was working after I spent about $6,000 on new Synology NAS and 8-24tb hard drives.
Not sure why Plex was reinstalled on the USB each time I deleted it, but we are in business now!
Turn off Autoload on your Fire TV!
Don’t use USB drives unless you must!
Hope this helps someone!
