Server Version#: Asustor NAS says 1.30.1.6562-915986d62, but server console says 4.87.2
Player Version#: Plex for Samsung 5.52.3
Two months ago, I moved Plex server from a Windows laptop to a new Asustor AS6404t NAS. I hooked them up to new router and bought a lifetime Plex Pass. That’s when I started to get “unexpected playback has occurred” message. It’s gotten worse and worse. My video streams are always Direct Play and it crashes whether audio is Direct Play or transcoded. I’ve used the same Samsung q90t TV (Tizen OS) for 10 months w/ no prior issue.
After the error, the TV app crashes hard. The Plex server console says it’s still playing the content to the TV for several minutes, but the TV needs to be rebooted to recover. Plex seems to work fine on my iPad after these errors.
What should I do to start investigating what’s broken?
By the way, when I try to upload my server logs, this site says “sorry, your upload failed.” The file is under 2 MB and verbose logging is turned off.
I figured it out, no thanks to Plex’s uninformative error messages or to this surprisingly useless forum.
In this case, the root cause was that the Plex client was losing internet from time to time. There seems to have been some kind of network gateway errors on the Samsung q90t TV. It might have been indirectly related to the Samsung TV not correctly supporting WPA3. I had to set up a WPA2 guest network on my router just for the TV to connect, since it refuses to work on WPA3. There might be some issue with the TV accessing the NAS, which is on my normal WiFi network. This is using an Asus RT-AX86U WiFi router with the latest Merlin firmware.
I wanted to ensure the TV and its apps were fully updated, so I tried to initiate an update check on the TV’s menu. The option to update was grayed out. Samsung’s tech support was as useless as Plex’s. It just said the TV didn’t have an internet connection - hard to believe, given that the TV’s YouTube and Netflix app worked fine. I noticed the TV recently began to repeatedly generate an error saying “Network,Gateway” (no space). Those errors seemed to coincide with typical times that I’d get the useless Plex errors. I Googled around and figured out that it could be as simple as the router somehow messing up the handoff from the guest network (with the TV) to the regular, more secure network (with the Plex server). That’s just a theory, I don’t really know. I unplugged the TV and router and plugged the router back in, let it boot, and plugged the TV back in. Voila, the “unexpected playback errors” stopped.
Another update: After a week, the same errors started again. The many dozens of Plex logs are enormous, despite having verbose turned off, and I can’t find any particular support on what all that stuff means, anyway. The next step I could think of was to blow away the entire database and the libraries and rebuild them.
The instructions to reset the Plex DB and libraries on a Linux OS on the Plex website are not quite correct for an Asustor NAS running ADM 4. The path to delete is “/volume1/Plex/Library/Plex Media Server”. Deleting everything in that folder and then logging into the Plex server via the NAS got the rebuild underway. Rebuilding a library of 167 shows and several thousand episodes only took a couple hours. That cleared the view history, but was pretty painless. The “unexpected playback error” messages have not yet reappeared after playing about 5 hours of content. So I’ll see how it goes.
Hopefully last update: the problem was with the custom “Merlin” firmware I used on my Asus RT-AX86U router. The firmware has a problem that causes the router to drop internet briefly when it changes radio channels. By locking the carrier channel, I prevented channel changing and the crazy stopped entirely.
While Plex “support” is a myth - you are really 100% on your own, lifetime pass or not - I do hope this helps someone some day.
