I’m using the Plex add-on on my Vero 4K and have watched movies and TV shows on it. But today I watched a sports video in the morning with no problem, but in the afternoon when I tried to watch a movie Plex failed to play it. It left a blank screen and after clicking “back” or Esc a few times I got back to the "Do you want to exit Plex dialogue, and when I clicked that got back to the Kodi interface after a wait of a few minutes.
I did some checking after rebooting (a few times): Plex played the sports video fine, Kodi on the Vero 4K plays the same movie with no problem. Plex from my PC can play the same movie. So it looks like some problem specific to the Plex add-on.
Here’s the log file: (sorry if there’s weird formatting - not sure how the link is meant to display in a post)
http://paste.osmc.tv/ajavunileh
Any suggested fix for this?
That log file doesn’t appear to provide any particular insight other than just showing an error retrieving a file from Plex. Are you saying that sometimes it plays a particular file and sometimes the very same file just hits a black screen and never starts? Do you see this behavior with just this one file or with others as well? If just this one file what type of encoding does it use? Is it being transcoded?
My best guess would be that it is being transcoded and maybe the server side is screwing something up with that. Just because it is playing back this file in a browser on a PC doesn’t mean it is serving the same file to both if one or both are being transcoded. You can go into the settings of the Plex add-on and modify allowed bitrates and formats which may change the behavior. Also restarting the Plex server would be a good step to try. I’ve seen more than one occasion where my server was only partially working and it needed to be closed and opened back up again.
Two different videos, one 4K, one 1080, consistently failed to play via the Plex add-on. Another one (the sports one) played fine. Don’t think it was a transcoding issue, since on the same Vero device the videos played OK under Kodi.
Anyway, I ended up removing the Plex add-on then reinstalling it from the official Kodi repository. Think it was 0.35. It’s now running fine, although - and perhaps I’m just imagining this - it seems a bit more sluggish.
Playing via a Kodi network path is not necessarily the same as playing through the Plex add-on as I believe the default settings for the Plex add-on are not to direct play. If you pull up the Plex server in your web browser the dashboard window will give insight into if it is transcoding or not though.
Yes, it’s entirely possible that there was an issue on the Plex server end. I’m running Plex via a docker container and I see that there has been a recent release that might have caused the problem. Unfortunately I can’t dig any further as I’ve reinstalled the add-on on the Vero box, and the problem has gone.
Thanks for taking the time to look into this.
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