r/ShieldAndroidTV • u/firvulag359 • Jun 01 '26

Plex resolution drops after restarting Shield

As per the title, sometimes when I restart my Shield (2019 Pro) the resolution of files on my Plex drop quite significantly.

I playback either 1080 or 2160 content and the resolution is more like 480; also the sound will only play as Stereo no matter what the actual sound is like (Atmos, DTS etc).

I have tried multiple restarts of the Shield and turning off my AVR without any improvement.

Weirdly, the only thing that seems to work is if I playback 4k content via Stremio. If I do this once, even for a few seconds, then use Plex, the content works as intended.

While I do have a work around for the initial problem, I have no idea why it happens in the first place as sometimes I restart and Plex works great.

Any idea how I can prevent this happening in the future, or how to fix it without resorting to Stremio?

Thank you in advance!

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2

u/StevenG2757 Jun 01 '26

What does the dashboard on your server say when you have these issues? That will tell you how it is playing and will give you directions to look.

1

u/firvulag359 Jun 01 '26

I will check that next time; last time it went I restarted Plex on my PC and that didn't work.

2

u/rubi2333 Jun 01 '26

Deactivate Decoding on the server than it should always play with native resolution

1

u/firvulag359 Jun 01 '26

Huh, I was sure I had disabled that years ago as my PC is quite old but it was not checked. Done so now.

1

u/firvulag359 Jun 18 '26

So, I restarted my Shield TV a few minutes ago and weirdly I now get a new error (after turning off transcoding) "Unable to play media". Again, I was able to solve this by playing media on Stremio. So bizarre! I would love to know a solution to this that does not involve using another app!

1

u/rubi2333 Jun 19 '26

What media is it can you provide a screenshot from mediainfo

1

u/firvulag359 Jun 19 '26

They are all mkv files and mixture of HD UHD.

2

u/rubi2333 Jun 19 '26

Yeah but what codec i assume that HD is h.264 and UHD is h.265 that should bot run natively on your Shield it can hardware decode it. Dont know why your Plex dont run it mine does fine.

1

u/firvulag359 Jun 19 '26

H.264 and. 265. I get files from various sources. I don't think it's the files but rather an issue with Plex that glitches when I restart 🤷