Can confirm that with audio passthrough off (Plex transcoding audio), I have had 0 buffers. Now to figure out what that exactly means because losing the audio is not acceptable in my book.
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At least youâre getting close now 
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So given that I donât think it is Plex related at all. I think it is how the shield is passing through the audio. I re-enabled audio passthrough in the Plex client, but disabled the âMatch content audio resolutionâ in shield and it seems to be working better. I swear this does not make any senseâŚ
Edit: I re-enabled match content resolution and apparently it is fine now?!? Nvm, I just had to say somethingâŚ
Edit 2: Ughhhhhhhh, it was working for so long. Not nearly as bad as before but it definitely still happens.
Edit 3: New cables on order but I feel like Nvidia needs to be brought into this 
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I have to admit I replaced all of my NVIDIA Shield TV Proâs, computer monitor and TV HDMI cables with these and never had an issue. I got sick of having HDMI issues across my devices so just got a bunch and replaced the lot.
Anyways it sounds like youâre getting close to a resolution, youâll need a beer and a good movie to watch after all of this 
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Found some mention online about disabling arc on my receiver. I have no use for it anymore since the shield does Chromecast, and so far so good. I am actually tempting fate at this point by writing this, hopefully she wonât waste my timeâŚand there it is, as I am writing, it bufferedâŚsmh
Edit 1: Turned on the adjust automatically flag inside Plex (even though it is still direct playing) and it is good (again tempting fate ) but that still doesnât explain why direct play directly from the network mount is borkedâŚ
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Got the new 48Gbps HDMI cables and I swear I canât tell anymore⌠like it seems to be better but it also occasionally happens. Nvidia has been contacted though so I will let you guys know if that goes anywhere.
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Looks like I am not alone:
Update: Nvidia finally got back to me asking for more logs, so we will see where that goes. Apparently, they pushed out a hotfix today.
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Finally got something from Nvidia (not exactly helpful, but better than most CS experiences I have had for technical issues):
From your logs, it looks like the Plex app is not filling audio track buffers so its a Plex app issue. Likely we are looking at corner case, we donât have any report of this from other users. Iâd recommend you to contact Plex support and see if there is any patches or possible solution that could help with this situation.
Not sure how that could be the case though because VLC and Kodi also are experiencing the same issue. Now only if people could come out of the woodwork since I doubt I am alone.
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Cross-posted to Plexâs forums as well including new logs, so hopefully that will go somewhereâŚ
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It looks like your file(s) are badly muxed and require excessive IO seeking in order to playback. If the audio and video packets are spaced too far apart, in order to playback the player will need to run lots of IO seeks back and forth which can be very slow.
I can see in your logs that the player is constantly having to run IO seeks every few milliseconds, which will lead to playback that needs to constantly pause and buffer before it plays.
You could try to resolve it by running the files through FFmpeg;
ffmpeg -i YOURFILE.mkv -c copy OUTPUTFILE.MKV(you can also use thePlex Transcoder;/path/to/PlexTranscoder -i YOURFILE.mkv -c copy OUTPUTFILE.MKV).Unfortunately thereâs no way for Plex to fix it as we canât increase our IO cache anymore (on the Android side) due to the constraints of the Android OS. It most likely works better in VLC as they use their own demuxer (and have less UI overhead so can increase the IO cache size), where as Kodi and Plex for Android both use FFmpeg.
Unfortunate response since it doesnât seem like a simple solution.
Can be a lot of processing to do, did it solve it if you try it on a known non-working file?
Have not gotten around to trying their fix yet, work has been far too busy prepping for end of the year.