Server Version#: 1.40.4.8679-7000
Player Version#: 8.38 (8773)
Noticing this over the last couple of weeks. There are some random shows and movies on Plex in ‘movies and shows’ that are crashing the app. By random I mean sometimes I can get the show to play, but then a different one later on will have a problem. Click on the show, the show looks like it wants to start, sometimes you’ll get a glimpse, then the app crashes and closes to the main Apple TV screen. Reopen the app, go to movies and shows and sometimes the server is disconnected until you hard close the app and restart it. I have worked around it a couple times by searching the movie through Siri and accessing it through the appletv Siri search menu.
is there possibly a fix for this? I have reinstalled the app to just rule that out.. any help is appreciated!
Same for me. I’m using 1.1.1.1 on my Apple TV. It’s updated on the latest non-beta firmware. It works 100% of the time until I try to watch something on-demand, e.g. a George Carlin special, and then the entire app crashes. Meanwhile, it works fine from my desktop.
Hey there! Yeah I came to that conclusion too. worked fine on laptop and devices, intermittent on both tvs. you can ‘brute force’ it. you just have to keep going through the cycle of opening the app, selecting, playing, hopefully it starts or repeat the process lol. I was trying all kinds of variations of clicking buttons too, like hit play while it’s loading, etc. nothing seemed to affect it. Weeds was giving me tons of trouble.
Trying to stream Merlin works fine with Google TV, but crashes the app when using an Apple TV. Restarting the Apple TV doesn’t seem to fix the issue. Deleting and re-installing the app fixed it until the first ad tried to play, and after that, it went back to constantly crashing when trying to start playback. (I also played one episode on the Google TV while I was deleting and reinstalling the app, so I’m not sure if that’s relevant.)
I use NextDNS, but didn’t see any blocked DNS requests for my TV. Just to be sure, though, I tried changing to 1.1.1.1 with DoH and restarted the Apple TV, but that didn’t result in any noticeable difference.
Looking at the app logs and stack trace from the crash report, it’s 100% related to playing ads.
App Logs right before the crash:
2024/08/18 00:39:06.152 (9728) ➖ PMKAdController.m:412 | Received ad event Loaded
2024/08/18 00:39:06.152 (9728) 🔧 PMKAdController.m:422 | Ad event loaded with media info: 1920x1080 @ 4022kbps
2024/08/18 00:39:06.152 (9728) ➖ PMKAdController.m:251 | Switched to ad FY24_Q4_RMAA_Kroger_CTV_Pebbles_Fort_15sec (669e78397f96d1c7d14a1f38-1)
2024/08/18 00:39:06.152 (9728) ➖ PMKAdController.m:631 | Changing IMA ad playback state from stopped to paused
2024/08/18 00:39:06.153 (9728) ➖ PMKAdController.m:324 | Fail-safe timer destroyed
2024/08/18 00:39:07.665 (10007) 🔧 PMKAppEventMonitor.m:93 | [AppEventMonitor]: App Start did start 00:39:07,6650
Console logs right before the crash:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'UIViewControllerHierarchyInconsistency', reason: 'child view controller:<IMAAdViewController: 0x1648f79c0> should have parent view controller:<PTVVideoPlayerViewController: 0x15cda2600> but actual parent is:<PTVVideoPlayerViewController: 0x15cbc2c00>'
I believe I’ve found a potential workaround for this crash. While I haven’t had time to watch an entire movie or episode yet, it looks promising so far.
The crash is occurring in the Google IMA (Interactive Media Ads) SDK. Until Plex and/or Google fixes this, technically inclined users can work around the crash by blocking access to the Google IMA server.
To do this, configure your network to block DNS lookups for imasdk.googleapis.com. In my case, I did this by adding the hostname to my NextDNS denylist, which causes lookups for that hostname to return 0.0.0.0. Something similar can be done for other routers or DNS resolvers though.
After blocking that hostname and restarting my Apple TV to clear its DNS cache, I’m now able to stream media that was previously causing the app to crash.
For further context, I’ve found reports of this crash occurring in older versions of the Google IMA SDK dating back to 2022. A fix was released in version 3.18.1 on October 2, 2022, and there doesn’t seem to be much more information about it since then. I’m not sure whether Plex is really using such an outdated version of the SDK or if the issue has resurfaced in a more recent version of the SDK. Either way, this workaround should hopefully help until the issue is resolved more appropriately.
(Also, I apologize for the quick successive replies to this thread. I’m not entirely sure whether I should be editing my previous replies or creating new ones. I’m mainly sharing updates as I learn more, and since the overall theme of each update has varied significantly, I figured it made more sense to post separate replies. The help text to the right of the editor telling me to avoid posting multiple replies is making me second-guess that, though… :P)
Same here. Crashes on Apple TV when trying to watch a tv show on demand. No personal server issues, only on demand.
Seems to be the ads. Reinstalled the app, everything is updated and it still crashes at the beginning of an ad or when an ad is about to start on the 1 in 30 tries and I get an episode to start.
Just wanted to say thank you for your efforts digging into the logs and spotting the crash point. I have been having the same exact crash on apple tv and suspected it was the ads causing it. I did the dns blackhole on the url you listed and the videos are no longer causing a crash.
