I’ve got a peculiar issue going on with PLEX that I’m hoping someone can help with. It’s a recent development with the latest round of updates. The short version is that some movies are taking forever to start playing on my Apple TV. It’s only some movies and there doesn’t appear to be any pattern that I can see, largie file size or small, mp4 of mkv, stereo only or surround sound I have movies in each category that play fine and movies that don’t. I hit play, I get the spinning circle for 4 or 5 minutes and then the movie starts playing with no issues.
Even more confusing is that it’s only on the Apple TVs in the house, android tv works just fine.
4-5 minutes is quite long…
do you have configured the Plex player to play trailers / pre-rolls that fail to load and play ahead of the actual video? I haven’t seen that behavior (Apple TV 4K w/ latest tvOS and Plex Test Flight version)
I have disabled the trailer and every other extra setting on the Plex server and am still having this issue. Does Plex have an actual support team, or is it just these forums? Again, this issue is only with the Apple TV and only isolated to some movies and there doesn’t appear to be any pattern that I can see, it’s not like the problem files are all mkv or something.
Is there a log or something somewhere so that I can see what Plex is doing when I’m loading a movie that has issues? When I watch the dashboard while playing a file that works I can see the movie instantly appear in the now playing section at the pop and the bandwidth meter starts running. When I play a file that doesn’t work I still see the bandwidth meter start running the same way, but nothing appears in the now playing section until a few minutes later when the movie starts.
If I attach a log file is someone able to help me interpret what’s going on? I tried to grab the data for just the duration of the test, this is a problematic file that’s taking two minutes to load. There is nothing special about this file, it’s just a standard resolution dvd rip.
I started playback at 5:25, playback began at 5:27.
Here’s the log for a movie that works fine, this is a larger file with better resolution and should therefore take longer to load, but this one begins playback in a couple seconds. About half my library has issues, the other half works just fine like this file.
There’s almost nothing in the logs for 90 seconds, but the player does seek around in the file a couple of times. After that it finally seems to recognize the container and start playback.
That makes me question the file a little bit. I wonder if allowing Plex to remux the file, or manually remuxing it, would help.
First try disabling “Direct Play” in the ATV settings.
So it looks indeed like there’s an issue with that file of yours
Not 100% sure if the missing timescale of the video stream will have caused that (log warning right after that 90 sec period) – seemingly the re-mux that’ll happen if your file is direct streamed (vs. direct played) is however fixing it for the Apple TV
2021/01/15 17:27:07.937 (956 MB) (7521345) ⚠️ PMKMPVClient.m:482 | [ffmpeg/demuxer] warn: mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2: stream 0, timescale not set
