Shield: video freezes after rewind, pause and play

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 1.25.4.5468
Player Version#: 8.29.0.30173 (“nightly” new demuxer build)

@BigWheel - as you requested here [Does Plex management care about the Android TV Client? - Plex Players / Streaming Devices - Plex Forum], I am opening a new post about a problem I and others have been having with the Shield Plex client for quite some time. After discovering the preview build for the new demuxer [Android: New video demuxer for improved playback - Plex Players - Plex Forum], and seeing others say it solved all their Shield problems, I was able to recreate this one on the preview build as I had previously done on various beta builds:

  • When playing a video, hit backspace (“left” on large remote navigation button, which backspaces 10 seconds).

  • When video starts playing again, hit pause/play button to pause video.

  • Then hit pause/play button again to resume playback.

  • At this point the audio starts as it should but the video freezes for some number of seconds. When the video unfreezes, oftentimes the video and audio are out of sync.

  • While in this state, hitting the backspace button again (rewind 10 sec) will cause everything to start working normally.

I used to believe this happened only with videos with ASS subtitles (and it is with those that I can pretty much replicate this at will). The logs I’ve attached here are for such a video. That said, yesterday I was playing another video that did not have ASS subtitles, and instead had external SRT subtitles, and I had the same problem (did not capture logs for that one).

The logs attached are for a video with embedded ASS subtitles, although the subtitles were not turned on during playback, and the video was direct playing – unlike some others reported earlier where the ASS subtitles were ON and the video was transcoding. I now suspect transcoding is not the cause, but the existence of subtitles seems to be a common factor. Also different than earlier reports, the problem captured here was in the middle of video playback, not near the end. In any case, for reference, here are a couple of the earlier reports of the same or similar problem:

Android player cannot rewind at end of video… (new hint?) - General / General Discussions - Plex Forum

Playback Hangs Near End of File After FF/RW/Pause - AndroidTV Client - General / General
Discussions - Plex Forum

This is a long-standing problem, and like others I was hoping the preview client would solve it. Alas, it does not. Please let me know if I can help with any other information.

Plex Shield log 2022-01-27.txt (4.9 MB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-01-27_21-24-41.zip (6.1 MB)

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thanks for all the details and logs

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Some second of picture freezing confirmed here aswell on shield tv 2019 with latest plex beta, will sideload some older versions to chek when this was introduced.

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@xenontx if you can provide the app an server logs after it happens so I can add to bug report it would be appreciated

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Collected During repro. Play event started on 02-15 20:22:25.740 with latest beta.

plex_shield_client_network_log.txt (45.9 KB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-02-15_20-34-32.zip (1.4 MB)

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Just to add my symptom is the following. Starting the media. Audio starts, picture is frozen. Usually it is not the first frame of the video, but a frame around 5-7 sec from the start. Audio plays properly until the audio part reaches the frozen frame then the video plays along with the audio properly.

It looks like somehow the video feed is skipped to 5 sec ahead in time and it waits till the audio reach the exact point. I can record it if it is needed.

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it is possible to get a sample of or full file that either of you can reliably reproduce this with. put it on Google Drive, Drop box or similar and message me a link (make sure it is set to anyone with link can open/access)

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@xenontx @BigWheel That’s a different problem than the one I reported here. The problem you described has been reported before (Is anybody working at Plex going to fix the Nvidia shield startup freezing but audio plays and then catches up fix).

There are reports that an experimental build (Android: New video demuxer for improved playback) fixed the problem you described, and it did for me as well. So hopefully that will work its way into a release soon.

However, the new video demuxer did not fix the problem I reported in this thread, so while the two problems may appear to be similar, they are clearly different.

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@boblinthewild is it possible for you to get a sample file I can add to bug report. message me a link to it.

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Thank you, in that case sorry for the confusion will test that build.

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Yep the nightly solved my issue

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I’ll see what I can do. I run across it randomly when I pause something to look more closely at what is showing on the screen. It can happen anywhere, with any video. I’ll try to create a short sample of something that I can use to trigger it reliably.

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