Video playback issues - Channel Master Stream Plus and FireTV

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#1.25.3.5409-f11334058
Player Version# 8.28.0.30077

I’ve been running Plex on my Channel Master Stream Plus DVR and FireTV for over 3 years - these two devices feed into my home theater. The Plex server runs on my Acer laptop.

I’ve never had any significant issues - but in the past week or so I’ve encountered a puzzling issue where I cannot play videos stored on my laptop in the PHOTOS FOLDER on either device. The AUDIO for the video will play clearly, but the video itself remains frozen, with a spinning orange circle in the center. Even on longer videos, after 2-3 minutes, the video remains frozen.

Interestingly, there’s no issues with my Roku Express which is installed in the TV in the living room downstairs.

I have tried a number of trouble shooting steps to eliminate bandwidth/network/connection issues.

To wit; I checked the feed on my Google wifi mesh - I have good, strong 300 Mbps+ connectivity so it’s not a lack of bandwidth. On both devices, I can stream 4k video from Youtube, so there’s no bandwidth issue at all.

Additionally, with the Channel Master, I uninstalled the Plex player, and reinstalled the latest version from Google Play. That didn’t fix it.

I’ve restarted the Plex server multiple times on my laptop, as well as updating to the most recent version. Did not help.

I also brought the Fire TV downstairs, and hooked it up to the same connection on the living room TV that the Roku Express connected to - it did not help - still couldn’t play videos thru Plex.

I then took the Roku express upstairs, and installed it in lieu of the Fire TV… HD videos play just fine via Plex on the Roku express. So obviously it’s not any network issue of any sort.

I have no idea what happened - this began suddenly. Videos played fine - then suddenly the issue cropped up on both devices at the same time. I made no changes at all to my home network or the streaming devices themselves.

Notably- on both devices, I have no issue playing HD content from Plex TV. I don’t get it.

Any help would be appreciated.

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The latest client software apparent screwed up video transcoding/playback on a variety of android TV devices

This affects users in different ways, in my case, videos in my photos folders don’t play, others are reporting issues that you are seeing. There are numerous topics with varied names but I think they are the same fundamental. Issue

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Thanks for the response- and yes, like you, my videos in the Photos folder do not play - oddly, I have HD movies in my video folder that play fine. I should, as an experiment, move some of the videos that currently won’t play from the photos folder to the video folder and see if that fixes for those videos. I’m not sure WHY it would but this is a bizarre, and annoying, issue!

The issue began suddenly about 1-2 weeks ago. I just put up with the nuisance, but I had more spare time over the weekend so I did thorough troubleshooting of my network and devices to try to isolate the cause.

It’s clearly an issue with the android apps on my two Android streaming devices. I had changed nothing about either device.

If numerous others with Android apps on their streaming devices are similarly affected, then this is an issue that Plex needs to address - walk back whatever update they pushed thru until they can debug it, etc.

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I have a Channel Master also- but the issue is with all android TV devices - Nvidia Shield, Fire Sticks etc - Roku, web clients and Apple TV arent affected

Plex is aware and working on this - as shown in this thread

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I just replied to that thread - I’m surprised that Plex hasn’t fixed this issue yet - it seems pretty easy - just open up the code that was changed in the update, identify the culprit, and apply a fix.

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