I’m experiencing a recurring issue with the Plex player on Nvidia Shield. Most of the time, the app simply stops responding and I’m forced to manually force-stop and relaunch it just to get it working again.
This typically happens:
After a period of inactivity
When I resume playback from another device
It’s extremely frustrating, as I can’t rely on the app to just work. Restarting it manually every time I want to watch something is not a trivial workaround — it defeats the whole point of having a media center experience.
I sincerely hope someone from the Plex team responds. I’m a paid customer, and I would really appreciate some technical feedback or a fix for this issue.
What’s the server installed on? You’ve tagged server-nvidia-shield, but you only mention the player on the shield.
Debug logs will help, I use the shield as my player and my server is on a different system. I don’t have this issue with my shield, but I haven’t used the server on the shield.
Thanks for the follow-up, everyone. Here’s a detailed explanation of the issue I’m facing:
– I’m using the latest model of Nvidia Shield as both Plex Server and Plex Player (fully updated).
– I also have a second, older Shield, used only as a player, with no server enabled on it.
– I only watch Plex on these two devices — I don’t use phones, tablets, or computers for playback.
– I never manually close the app. When I pause a movie, I simply stop playback (e.g. back out to the main menu or home screen) and turn off the TV or leave the Shield idle.
The issue:
Whenever I try to resume watching later, the Plex player app fails to load the library — it just spins or stays on a black screen. The only way to fix it is to go to Shield settings → Apps → Plex → Force stop, and then reopen the app.
After that, the library loads and everything works again — until the next time I pause for a while.
To make things clearer, I’ve just recorded a short video showing exactly what happens:
I’d really appreciate guidance on how to collect debug logs for this situation. I’m not familiar with debugging on the Shield — is there a simple way to extract relevant logs when both server and player are running on the same device?
Also worth noting:
This never used to happen before.
I’ve been using the same setup for years, and this issue only started recently.
That’s why I don’t think it’s a hardware or setup problem — something must have changed on the software side.
If you need more info or want me to test something specific, I’m happy to help — just let me know how.
It’s possible a Shield update occurred that changed a setting back to default or something.
The only thing I can really see being an issue would be the drives going to sleep being plugged into the Shield’s USB port and knowing there’s an option to prevent it on the Shield. Logs will hopefully help to confirm that.
