First, let me start off by saying that we all know the PS4 client/player is an absolute shitbox - that’s not a knock on the devs here please don’t confuse me on that. I know you guys do the best with what you’re given by Sony. When I switched to Plex full-time about a year ago - I read a handful of horror stories about the PS4 player, freezes, not recognizing network, space hookers jumping out of the screen, etc. so I made sure to setup everything properly to leave no room for error before uninstalling my previous server (UMS the branch from PS3 media server) totally. To my surprise everything worked flawlessly for the most part, a few hiccups here and there, but nothing I couldn’t figure out (if you’ll check out my other posts you’ll see what I DID run into.
About a week ago I launched it, and when it was in the middle of loading the loading/buffering/spinning logo and it froze, wouldn’t let me back out, move the selector, get into settings - anything (this was just after an OS update). I let i sit for like 20-30 minutes, the wheel got another rotation done, but still frozen (the clock on the screensaver stopped as well, but the PS4 wasn’t frozen - I could close the app and re-open it, but would get the same result. Upon asking a friend who has a PS5 and uses the media server from tiem to time said that he wasn’t currently having trouble, but once I told him of my issues w/ the PS4 player he said that’s what he ran into when trying to setup Plex some years back.
I know my PS4’s HDD is getting slower, so i did a total re-initialization, redownoaded everything but was still getting the same issue. I tried checking it or loading it a few times over the next week or so - same ■■■■. It only started freezing AFTER I’d logged in. So I told Plex to launch the DLNA client and had just been using the PS4’s Media player to watch stuff from the media server, watching to make sure I did not launch stuff that would require transcoding as then the media player wouldn’t be able to handle it).
Come today I had to go over to dog/house sit for my Aunt & Uncle. I brought my PS4 (as I always do when I stay over here) and hooked it up to the network and picked up watching the Olympics women’s semi-final. After I had watched that, I figured I’d fire up Plex and see what happened. Much to my surprise, it logged in and loaded the media player and located the media server.
The ONLY thing that had changed since I’d re-initialized it and re-downloaded everything was the connection. At home I used a wired connection, but here it’s gotta be wireless (no trouble streaming 720p, 1080p (x264 & x265 - the majority of my media server is in 720p as the bulk of it was built-up before x265 came around & 8TB externals were cheap) to get on the network with.
So, and I have aboslutely no evidence to back this up - if/when the Plex player freezes or does whatever goofy ■■■■ it does on Playstation 4, try resetting your connection, go from wired to wireless and try the player out, or vise versa if you normally run wireless. Perhaps this will knock free whatever internal “logjam” the player has going on. Anyway if someone runs into the freezing,/lagging/force close issue on the PS4, try this out and see if it works after setting up the connections again and see what happens. If/when this happens please come back here and let me know so maybe this can be our “fix” until either Sony gives developers better info to help them create a better app, or it gets fixed.
Also, I did notice in one of the prior incarnations of Plex that if I rolled it back, or didn’t use the “future look” or “look ahead” or whatever it’s called everything worked fine. That wasn’t the case here, but it was another type of “fix” in the past.
Anyway, please let me know if you guys are able to get it working with my hypothesis. and of course with all that being said, I’ve also been extraordinarily lucky since I switched to Plex full-time. As I said I haven’t run into the issues that most people have seem to with the client on this device, just an issue getting the server to pop up before, and from last week to today, an issue with the player itself lagging/freezing.
I’ll get the server version in here when I’m back home and have access to the internal server.
Server Version#: v2.6.2.0 Built Dec, 17 2020 07:19:05
Player Version#: 5.20.1
