Like any other Plex client, Plex on Android requires the device to have the broadest format support it can have before it can playback the streamed movies. In your case, it sounds like your Note does not have some of the video codecs required to play the movie itself.
Here's my Plex Advanced Settings:-
- Secondary Media Player = Play OpenGL Player. Leaving it on Plex Player will force it to play only on the built-in "Videos" app that comes with your Note. OpenGL Player makes sure it plays a wider variety of file format. I believe this only comes as an option when you have additional third party video players installed. Mine is the excellent DICE Player.
- Direct Play = Offer Choice of Direct Play. Depending on how fast your connection is, leaving it enabled will result in long caching/buffering for a movie to play especially if the movie is of higher definition.
- Enable Direct Streaming ticked
- AV Sync Offset = -2ms. This is only to compensate for high bitrate MKV files with 6 channel sound downmixed to stereo.
- Less Color/More Speed = *depends* Initially I had to tick it to get a movie running, as the frame rates starts stuttering. After I set "Secondary MEdia Player" as "Plex OpenGL Player", I've unpicked this and it plays smoothly without stutter, and the colors are more vibrant. In short, if your movies stutters or choppy, tick this on.
- leave "Enable Good Day Mate" and "Bonjour/ZeroConf" ticked as well.
Also, if you are using Plex to play "anywhere" instead of just at home within your WiFi network, sign up for myPlex and log in into myPlex on both your Android and server PC/MAc running at home. Depending on how fast your connection is (3G/4G), your movies will need to buffer and or the picture quality will be degraded as your connection worsen. In my case, I'm using Yes4G at 10-13Mbps so it only buffers slightly but maintain picture quality.Bear in mind this will eat your data allocation like mad, and is not advisable unless you have unlimited data. Also, you can set the bitrate you're comfortable with on the "Remote Plex" and "Plex over 3G/4G" settings to whatever connection your line is able to stream at. Leaving it at "Auto Select" is fine, but as you move from areas of good connection to worse, so does the movie streaming quality will degrade/upgrade accordingly.
I think in your case, you might wanna try installing DICE Player, which is a paid option. Moboplayer is free, you may want to try that and see if that helps. I prefer DICE as it is the only player that supports hardware acceleration.
Thanks man. It is working now.