Plex fixes a frustrating playback bug affecting Samsung smart TVs

Published Aug 21, 2026, 12:26 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Plex v5.94.3 on Samsung Tizen TVs caused "Playback Error" and blocked video playback. Plex quickly pushed a patch and opened an investigation; the issue appeared to be limited to Samsung TVs. Make sure you update the Samsung Plex app to solve the problem. Plex users running the app on Samsung's Tizen smart TV platform reported that version 5.94.3, the latest update to the self-hosted streaming platform, prevented video playback. When users tried to play videos, a notification appeared that said, "Playback Error. An unexpected playback error occurred." At this point, there's no option but to press "OK," and as you may have guessed, the video still doesn't play. Thankfully, Plex swiftly pushed out a patch to solve the issue (via @Neowin). This issue follows a platform outage from back in early July. As expected, many Plex users aren't happy about yet another technical issue and are turning to the platform's official forums to complain. In a post before the fix was released, Plex employee rzoidberg33 said, "We're aware of the issue and an investigation is underway." The issue was isolated to only Samsung TVs Make sure you update the app The outage seemed to only affect Samsung TVs, with several users stating that the app was still working fine on their TVs from other brands. With all of this in mind, if you're running into issues with the Plex app on your Samsung TV, make sure you update it to the latest version. In other Plex-related news, the self-hosted streaming app recently brought back the left-hand navigation sidebar on Apple TV, Roku, Android TV, and Fire TV, following backlash from users regarding a controversial full app refresh earlier this year. The app refresh still hasn't made its way to smart TV platforms like Samsung's Tizen and LG's webOS. A few months ago, Plex raised the price of its popular lifetime Plex Pass from $250 to $750, prompting backlash from longtime users.