tvOS and iOS "Couldn’t create the playback session for this item" and High Network and CPU

[techMology]

Server Version#: 1.25.1.5286 (linux-ubuntu)
Player Version#: iOS 7.25

Having a problem that seems to be limited to my iOS and tvOS friends. Verified this issue doesn’t occur with Android TV or Tizen TV clients. Haven’t tried a Roku.

When trying to stream, I am getting frequent “Couldn’t create the playback session for this item” and less frequently “Couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item. Please try again” errors. This can happen quickly, or things can go for a while (15 minutes) before playback stops. HW transcoding for sure.

Checking my Plex Dashboard, network traffic is oddly high for 1 client (21 Mbps even when playing a smaller file - it rarely spikes to 6 or 8 Mbps in my prior experience), and CPU usage up to 60% - sometimes 80%. Usually, when transcoding, my CPU barely registers because of HW transcoding.

Same file, same conditions, on a different client (Google TV with Chromecast Android TV version) and the file plays fine.

All my Apple TV remote users are having this problem. I’ve reproduced the issue on my iPhone (minus the error message - playback just seems to stop with no error).

Any ideas? I’m running the latest public server version. It’s just started happening over the past week maybe.

[ChuckPa]

The DEBUG logs ZIP file, which captures the start of one of these sessions will tell us a great deal.

In most cases like this, the player settings got reset and need to be reasserted.

[techMology]

Wasn’t sure what “reasserted” meant, so I went ahead and deleted my tvOS Plex application, rebooted, and then re-downloaded it again to see if that worked. It did not crashed promptly right after.

Was watching “How To with John Wilson” and it crashed at around 2:40 or 2:41.

Help!!

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-12-04_14-48-56.zip (4.9 MB)

[techMology]

It shows up as “How To Appreciate Wine” in the logs.