play Nvidia shield it asked me to put the new player for videos on and I tried it and it’s terrible compared to the old one who ever made that should go back to the drawing board rethink the old one is gray and way better and it has subtitles underneath the city of having to start the movie so you can switch between subtitles anytime during the movie about having to exit
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I changed to the new player last night but cant find how to change it back, anyone know how?
For me, the only thing wrong with the new video player and my first generation NVIDIA shield and first gen controller is that they have totally borked to controls. “B” no longer goes back during playback and the triggers no longer skip and instead they use the shoulder buttons. I’d like o see this fixed or have a controller configuration/remapping in some way please.
Despite totally ruining the controller mapping I found the new video player otherwise pleasurable and enjoyed the added metadata in the playback UI for instance.
@radind I would guess it depends on your device but for me it was in: Settings —> Advanced —> Enable new video player. HTH!
EDIT: Two things wrong for me: This useful overlay metadata no longer shows up 
see this other thread: New Player Removes Information Overlay
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it’s in the settings you have to go down on the Nvidia shield just go down the bottom if you can change it in the settings when you log into your Plex app on your account it’s close to the very bottom by where you can turn on the thing where if you have problems at a key login so you can send it to collect that area
The fast forward and rewind functions just missed the mark on this entirely. There’s also a bug with the 10s rewind. I was sitting on the couch tried to rewind by hitting that multiple times and the time it said it was going back kept going up but the video just stayed at the same spot or might have moved back the initial 10 sec. It’s at least an easy bug to reproduce.
The fast forwarding is just irritating because it indexes forward so much faster than the old player and doesn’t attempt to show the preview of the content so you can shoot past where you were trying to fast forward to really easily and then combine with the rewind bug it gets frustrating fast.
Wow I always assumed that rewind bug was because of certain video codecs or something. Sad to see its a general bug, but yeah that’s been going on awhile. Basically have to double press rewind, otherwise it’ll just go back to the same clip every time.
But why I actually logged on today, was to express my discontent with the new watch interface as well. Granted it’s a small thing, but judging time on my own is annoying when such a feature was there and has been removed for no reason… Showing the time the video will end. So useful, can we please get that back?!
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I can’t stand the new player mostly because of navigation. The old one showed me WHERE I actually was in the show. Now I have to press ‘display’ to see where I am. Fast forward and rewind give NO context. What does a fast forward icon counting up even mean once it passes 60 seconds? Nobody understands intuitively what 260 seconds even means who can do that kind of math in their heads on the fly? When it gets to 60 it needs to change to minutes and seconds to even be usable. But even then it isn’t nearly as good as just having a timeline. Or at least a time elapsed and remaining showing… SOMETHING.
And no preview or even a time at when fast forwarding or rewinding? I get totally lost and have no idea where I am in the show. It is truly unusable when it comes to navigation.
I tried turning on display then fast forwarding and it turns off the timeline and I get lost again. The old interface is Waaaay better please fix this before making us use it! It’s torture as it is. It’s like a blindfolded intern invented this thing.
Oh and I loved the feature where it showed when the video would end, that’s cool. Anyway any cool features like the aspect ratio and stuff are overshadowed by terrible navigation. And it is too hard to enable subtitles too it should still be two clicks (down + enter).
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We’ve found it crashing quite often after skipping forward, it just freezes, then after about 30 seconds the Plex player will crash and restart, but still will not commence the same video, we just get the animated wait circle then it crashes again. The only way to get it working is to restart the entire Shield TV.
I wish Plex would just stop changing things for no reason, as it is rarely better, and always buggy. Just when they’ve ironed all the bugs out with this new player they will go and introduce a new player and we regress again.
Going to try Kodi next for playing video, can’t be any worse can it.
The same rewind bug we have on our Plex App on the TV (Samsung), so that’s been around for a while in one form or another, it’s the reason we use a Shield now for playback, although now have new bugs on the Shield TV with these latest updates. Plex = more bugs than you can shake a stick at. 
There is another issue. While watching movies in different aspect ratios the new player always gives the subs at the bottom of 1.78 screen. I guess it’s OK for most people but I have a special purpose room with a 2.35:1 screen and the subtitles in the new player flows over, thereby rendering them useless.
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I’ll second the completely broken experience using the controller to navigate around on the first gen Shield.
- When you first start a movie you can press B to exit, but at the end you can’t? You have to navigate back to the episode through the playback controls - it’s nuts.
- Sometimes when I first start videos, the menu doesn’t disappear. There is no button to make it go away. I have to exit the movie and then resume and it will go away. I haven’t figured out exactly when this happens and when it doesn’t but it’s often.
- You have to click down to pull up the playback controls before you can do anything at all with the video.
I’m switching it off for now.
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I’ve seen another issue with the new video player on the Nvidia Shield client app playing videos from a local NAS server. For at least a year, I had 1 Cinema Trailer and 1 random cinema pre-roll video from the NAS play before a movie started playing. That had been working flawlessly. One of very recent updates to the Shield client caused this to no longer work. I ensured all of the settings were correct on the server and client side. Even in the web browser client, the trailer and pre-roll video played correctly. After hours of playing with settings on the Shield Plex client app and trying to look for error messages in the log files, I ended up reverting back to the old version of the client using the Apps > Plex > Uninstall updates button. After relinking the client with the server and reconfiguring the appropriate settings on the client, the trailer and cinema pre-roll works again.
This is only a temporary solution though since the Shield will eventually auto-update the app. Hopefully this issue can be fixed in the next update to the Shield Plex client app.
Yep. 2 clicks and I’m changing subtitles would be a great UI. I think I’m counting 8 clicks to change subtitles in this current UI and wow that is cumbersome
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I hate the new player. It crashes all the time. It locks up, spinning yellow circle forever, never launches the video. Even closing the app, and restarting the app doesn’t fix the problem…the player repeats the defect. Have to reboot the device!! Finally, i gave up on this stupid thing, and have reverted to the old player. Yeah, the old player has trouble with imbedded subs - crashes, but the new player has the same problem. So i see no improvements for me with new player, in fact it is worse than junk.
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Got a shield pro 2019 for Xmas, tried the new player to stream from my plex server on the pc and it would only play stuff encoded in H.264. Anything in H.265 just gave a spinning yellow circle. Switched back to the old player and it all worked fine.
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The new player unfortunately is unusable at the moment, I deactivated it for the time being.
- Next Episode screen does not disappear, when next episode starts automatically or is started manually using “Play” Button. The Episode will play invisibly in the background however. Only when manually starting the next episode with “OK” the screen vanishes.
- Audio/subtitle language can only be changed once. GUI does not reflect that change and language can not be changed again
- Multipart Videos do not work
- No Overlay for resolution, transocing info etc.
- Time, when video file will end is not shown
- Switching audio and subtitle tracks is a total pain.
- GUI is not shown, when Pausing/Playing video
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Echoing others above me, I’ve turned off the new player due to playback issues, the gui for ffwd being garbage (measured in seconds with no context).
Hopefully by the time it’s mandatory they’ll have fixed all the problems.
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nVidia shield pro user here. I find that with the new player (plex official app) I get a lot of stuttering in some movies, even if the match framerate option is on in plex. I see the screen flickering at the start of the movie, but I get stutter every 3/4 seconds. And not for every movie (I think it depends on the framerate of the movie)
So it seems that there is something wrong with the player itself because reverting to the old player gives zero stutter.
File that stutters:
Codec H264
Bitrate 3019 kbps
Lingua English
Bit Depth 8
Chroma Location left
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Coded Height 544
Coded Width 1280
Frame Rate 25 fps
Height 544
Livello 4.1
Profilo high
Ref Frames 6
Scan Type progressive
Width 1280
Display Title 720p (H.264)
File that doesn’t:
Codec HEVC
Bitrate 11621 kbps
Bit Depth 10
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Coded Height 1616
Coded Width 3840
Color Primaries bt2020
Color Range tv
Color Space bt2020nc
Color Trc smpte2084
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Height 1610
Livello 5.1
Profilo main 10
Ref Frames 1
Width 3840
Display Title 4K (HEVC Main 10 HDR)Anyone from plex following up with these? I’m sure a lot of people aren’t adopting the new player.
Anyone has a list of “real benefit” from the new player?
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Until they fix the controller issues with not using the triggers for skipping and ‘B’ to exit I won’t be enabling it.
They also keep re-enabling it with every Plex app update on the Shield which arbitrarily inflates their “adoption” numbers because some people are too ignorant to care or don’t know and they don’t disable it.
