I was all excited to have the Shield be a replacement for my NUC i5, but not having a good experience so far.
I currently have a Synology NAS used to store my media, which is accessed by my NUC and Shield, which are all connected through gigabit ethernet. I added Movies to the Shield PMS and let it download all the metadata and, even hours later, it is unbearably slow to access and play media from it. I have media ranging from 3-30 mbps and have tried both direct and transcoding.
Thumbnails are not turned on.
Using even the Shield to access it’s own PMS, it takes 10 seconds after I select the movie for the pre-play screen to display, and then another 20 seconds for the movie to actually play when I click the play button.
I’m seeing similar experience with my iPhone and ethernet connected desktop.
Anyone else have similar slowness? I’m using a 16GB Shield, if it makes a difference.
Someone else reported slow times on the huge Plex on Shield thread in the Android TV board. As a test, can you copy a movie to the Shield TV’s internal storage and see if access/wait times diminish?
@kegobeer-plex said:
Someone else reported slow times on the huge Plex on Shield thread in the Android TV board. As a test, can you copy a movie to the Shield TV’s internal storage and see if access/wait times diminish?
Now how would I be able to add media to the internal storage?
According to the release notes, “Access SHIELD folders from a network PC or Mac and enjoy drag-and-drop file sharing. Enable in Settings > Storage & reset > Access SHIELD folders on PC.”
When I got into “Storage & reset”, I only see Internal Storage, Network Storage, and Factory Data Reset.
@stephen.kim, you are running the 3.2 update? There is definitely an option in Storage and Reset for enabling a computer to access the Shield. Do you have the latest Plex Server installed on the Shield? You need Plex Media Server app v.0.9.17.1.256. You can force the update under by going to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plexapp.mediaserver.smb&hl=en on your computer, which will download and install it for you on the Shield.
Yes, I’m on 3.2 and wouldn’t have known I needed to upgrade to 0.9.17.1.256 since I didn’t see any needed updated in the Play Store. But I did upgrade to this version and it made no difference on the speed. I’ll try a factory reset, so here’s hoping I can get this working acceptably…
Well this is becoming increasingly frustrating. After a factory reset, things seemed to be going well. Response was faster than before and I could play the media I was testing with.
Then it started to not play my high-bitrate media (~30 mbps), it would just display the spinning circle for minutes until I backed out. PMS kept shutting down. The PMS option went missing in the Settings/Advanced menu before it magically appeared before right when I turned on one of my controllers (may have been coincidence, but still…). PMS would say Offline, but when I selected to turn it on, it said it was starting up and then would go back to offline.
This is the early (first) days and I’m sure many are having good experiences with this feature but my experience is with a Shield I bought 4 days ago and even having troubles after a factory reset. I’m sure things will get better with updates but doesn’t give me the confidence to replace my NUC PMS.
I have exactely the same issues. I had to do a factory reset. After that the Plex server on my Nvidia Shield TV is totally screwed!!!
It takes ages to open the pre-play Window before playing the move. I have my media mounted on my NAS…
Installing your 128GB MicroSD won’t increase the storage that PMS can use since it currently will only use the internal storage for it’s data directory (meta-data, add-on, etc…). If you only have a 16GB Shield it’s recommend that you don’t enable the thumbnail preview option since that will eat up your internal storage.
This is a known issue and hopefully Plex will update PMS to allow for the use of adopted storage and/or allow us to use a custom directory path of our choosing for the PMS data directory in the future.
Sleep mode for the Shield TV is not the same same as putting your laptop to sleep. Sleep mode on the Shield TV is more like when you turn off the screen on your Android phone or tablet. The device is still running and doing things in the background but is a lower power mode (Doze). This is why your hard drive does not power down. Background apps can still access it while in sleep mode. The only way to power down your drive is to power off the Shield TV or get a drive / enclosure that will spin itself down when the drive is idle for some period of time.
Shield TV v3.x introduced adopted storage which would allow you to increase the storage capacity of the Shield TV and most apps will see and use that storage without any problem. Kodi/SPMC have no problem running their data directory off of adopted storage for example
There are basically 2 types of data directories that apps can use in Android. There is a internal /data directory and then there is /Android/data which is typically located in the user accessible storage area. /data has a lot of extra security measure on it and unless you have root access, you will not be able to get into that directory. This is also why you can’t install 3rd party addons.
When you adopt storage, that basically increases the /Android/data directory but not the /data directory. Plex has decided to only use /data for the PMS app which is hard linked to the built in storage of the Shield TV. So if you have a 16GB Shield TV, as of right now, that is the only space PMS will be able to use for it’s data directory even if you’ve adopted a huge external SD, SSD, HD, etc… to the Shield TV.
There are plenty of other threads in this forum as well as Nvidia’s talking about this limitation and the hops that Plex is update the PMS app to use adopted storage and/or allow us to define a custom path for the PMS data directory.
I am having the exact same issue. Streaming a movie using Kodi on Shield is instant, but playing a movie via PMS hosted on the Shield has a delay about 10 seconds before any content is displayed. It’s not all the time though that it’s happening. Interestingly no network traffic is seen during these 10 seconds so it’s puzzling.
And I would like to note that the movies are always played on Direct Play.
Same here. It seems to be related to PMS on Shield and not Plex client.
When I start the playback of a movie it takes 10-20 seconds for it to start. During this timelapse, the playback isn’t even considered started in the dashboard, PMS just seems to hang. Once it pops up on the dashboard, the playback starts half a second later.
It happens with any Plex client connected to a Shield PMS.
If I use another Plex server with the same movie the playback starts instantly on any Plex client. In all cases it is direct play.
It used to be just fine a few months ago. As time went on, this issue started occuring from time to time (no visible pattern) but now it just happens every single time. Not sure if it went worse after an update or if it’s just my library growing that somehow can’t be handled anymore by the Shield PMS. It’s however relatively small: < 400 episodes + < 200 movies.
Also, sometimes in the middle of a 4K movie (direct play) the Shield TV just freezes: the movie pauses every other second for a second, the remote is laggy, … seems the Shield TV is running out of RAM or CPU resource. My only resort is rebooting the Shield (ugh.).
I’m considering a factory reset but from what I read on other sites, it won’t be of any help. Is PMS on Shield just not smooth anymore?
This problem might have been Synology all along.
I have updated the version of my Synology to latest and I no longer experience the slow downs.
I have left SMB1 to SMB3 support turned on the Synology.
My movies even very large start quickly, in under 2 seconds.
