I put on an episode of a show I’m watching, and about ten minutes into it, I missed something on screen, so pressed the skip back button on my remote. The spinning loading circle came up, but stayed for a while, and the episode froze at the point where I’d pressed the button.
No problem I thought, I haven’t used Plex for a while, it might just need a little kick. I restarted my fire stick, and restarted the Plex server, just in case. A few minutes later, I didn’t catch what a character said, so I tried skipping back again. Plex crashed again. Another set of restarts and we’re watching again.
About 15 minutes later, the episode just freezes. No error message or warning, just a frozen screen. I gave it a minute and pressed play, and Plex crashed back to the episode selection screen. Pressing play worked again for a few minutes, until I got an error on screen telling me that my network is too slow for the video. It’s a less than 1080p video streaming at 10 Mbps over a gigabit connection. This time, reopening the video took me back to the point of the last issue.
So much for relaxing in front of the TV…
I completely understand venting vs wanting solutions…
But sometimes I can’t help myself. There are a whole host of things that could cause this. Happy to suggest things to test if you want, or there’s an easy way to try an alternative. Have you considered giving Jellyfin a shot?
I’ve been holding off switching to Jellyfin for a while because I paid for a Plex pass, but I’m getting to the point where that’s not going to stop me from swapping.
You can always run both at the same time and see which works better
Or just run both, period!
Plex is definitely more straightforward to maintain remote access to your content (including library sharing with friends & family). So it may be worth keeping up for that aspect alone, even if you end up liking Jellyfin better.
All I need to do now is actually remember to set Jellyfin up 🙈
+1 Jellyfin is the best!
Jellyfin is your friend…
It will be very soon 🙂
I’d recommend running Jellyfin server but using Kodi as your frontend, best of both worlds, especially if you use subtitles as subtitles still work really poorly on Jellyfin
I used to run Kodi, but I moved away from it a few years ago. I can’t remember why off the top of my head, so I’ll have to look into it and see what turned me off it.
It’s definitely not as lightweight, but as I rely on subtitles a lot I have to run most stuff through Kodi unfortunately. I find it to work quite well though with the Jellyfin add-on. I don’t know if it’s because the development of Jellyfin is mostly done in the US, who often dislike subtitles, but this has been an ongoing issue for years at this point.
I use Radarr to process my videos, and I’m sure I’ve got a plugin or script somewhere to download subtitles. I’d forgotten all about it since I’ve been using Plex, so I’ll have to try to remember what it is.
There’s also a client called Jellyfin Media Player that works pretty well. I tried Kodi one time and really couldn’t stand it. Felt so cluttered and clunky to me.
I hadn’t heard of that. I’ll check it out, thanks :)
I’ve been using Plex hosted on a Mac Mini for years, multiple hours every day, and have never had issues like this. I hope you’re able to figure it out.
It’s just taken me 55 minutes to watch a 35 minute episode
This happens to people who watch shows on cable TV, where episodes or movies are padded with ad breaks.
So I guess the silver lining is: at least you didn’t have to watch any ads.
True 🙂
I watch free OTA channels on Jellyfin. (HDhomerun)
I’ve been using Jellyfin with no issues. It has been mostly rock solid for years.
It does have issues from time to time but I think the community is much healthier. Also you can always report it upstream and or dig into the code.
You might be slightly overestimating my coding abilities 😁
I haven’t had issues this bad, but Plex has been buffering a lot more lately. If moving to Jellyfin didn’t involve new hardware for me, I would have already jumped ship.
Why would Jellyfin need new hardware?
I run plex on a synology nas whose kernel is too out of date for hardware accelerated transcoding in Jellyfin.
I recently went from synology video to Jellyfin cause the last update on synology dont support the video hosting anymore. I run a syn 920. And its sweet only issue so far have been able to use jellyfin to cast to Chromecast.
It’s been about a year since I tried it, so it’s probably worth another. Back then it did OK if I was doing straight passthrough (though CPU load was noticeably higher) but I got a lot of buffering when I’d try to have it transcode anything.
I host quite a few things on it (via docker) so the 920 is starting to show its load. I suspect that and the lack of hardware acceleration are the source of my issues.
I should probably mention i did upgrade it past the supported kernel and doubled the ram, i only host pihole and bitwarden and jellyfin. But docker makes things so much easier and fun.
Can’t you just use a newer kernel?
Wouldn’t this also be a significant security issue?
No, diskstation runs a significantly modified 2.4 kernel. They say they backport CSM mitigations/fixes into their kernel, but community pressure is growing by the year for them to update.
Holy shit, I remember being excited for 2.4 because of iptables. That was over twenty years ago.
Have you considered just installing Debian?
Can you elaborate on the Plex issues as of late? One of the guys I share my instance with has reported a lot of buffering that I haven’t been able to reproduce.
Sudden buffering followed by a very long load time before it can get going again. Lowering the resolution resolves it for me.
What I’m seeing only on certain files though. And those files will always buffer again at the same point in playback. But it happens on things I watched without issue prior to my last update. So I suspect it’s a problem with a specific codec, but I haven’t taken the time to validate my hunch.
It shouldn’t be buffering at all if you’re direct playing.
Can’t say I’ve experienced this myself. Are you transcoding? That’s the only time I have some issues with rewinding. Figure out why you’re not direct playing. There’s no buffering or issues with seeking if you’re direct playing. Jellyfin won’t really help in this circumstance.
I’ve checked the file. It’s a bog standard h264 mkv and the video bitrate is only 10Mbps. There’s nothing that the fire stick shouldn’t be able to handle on its own. I’ll try playing it on the fire stick again and see if it’s trying to do something weird, but I can’t see it being that.
Curious what you find out. I can’t say I’ve had an issue direct playing anything on any device really. What you describe sounds exactly like seeking while transcoding though, that’s a pain in the ass and I just don’t do it. Direct play all the way.
I just checked the episode through Plex, and it’s direct playing. I didn’t get any stuttering while I was skipping around though. I think it’s Plex itself, either the server or the player.
My physical server is a bit old now, it’s a Haswell i5, so if this was an ultra HD bluray rip I could understand it, but it’s been playing HD and 4k videos without issues for years now.
Direct play should take very little CPU regardless of media quality, I can have multiple 4K streams going and my utilization is <10% on a Cameron J3455 (4c/4t Apollo Lake). When you’re direct playing it’s more a factor of HDD/network speed and the client than anything server side.
Is it just that one file?
Nope. It does it with random videos every now and then, and with no obvious pattern. It’s not lasting for a set amount of time either, so it’s not like something’s running in the background and slowing it down for a while.
In the past I’ve shut down everything I can think of on the server to stop something from taking priority, but it still happens. On those occasions it’s happened for half an hour or more, but other times it might last for a few minutes, or just affect one episode.
similar issues with other titles or just that one file?
I just watched an episode of a different show, and while it didn’t completely crash, it still stuttered and paused randomly.
I know it’s not the server itself, as it’s handling more intense tasks regularly with no issues, and the network works on every other device too. I stream higher quality with higher bit rates to the fire stick regularly too, with no issues.
It could be the specific audio or video codecs of those files causing the stuttering issues. I’ve always seemed to have trouble with EAC3 audio even after 6 or 7 years and a multitude of updates and different hardware.
That’s a good point. I’ll check the file and see if there’s anything unusual compared to the others 🙂
Just solved an issue with transcoding where I had to delete the codec. It redownloads on server launch so was an easy fix.
I’ll give that a try, thanks :)
Check the file
Nothing unusual about it, and it plays perfectly on my PC. I’ve tried randomly skipping backwards and forwards, but still no issues. It’s a bog standard h264 mkv file too, so nothing that would need to be transcoded
Plex app is such garbage on my old firestick and Samsung TV now. Used to work fine, no more.
I just bought an Informir MAG 544 set top box. Runs linux, not android. Haven’t set it up yet, I have high hopes. If it does work well I’ll probably ditch plex for Jellyfin.
I’m tempted to get a different box for the TV, but everything else runs perfectly. I’ve been looking into switching to Jellyfin too, but I’ve been trying out Stremio for a little while, and it works much better than Plex. It’s missing a few features like easy user switching, and it can’t organise and play my family videos as far as I know, but it would mean not having to store loads of media.
never had an issue with plex but crunchy roll seems to have a memory leak or something were if you need to leave the app after every movie or couple of episodes and flush it out by running something else like a youtube video. then when you come back its generally fine. Also though there was some prime updates that seemed to effect the whole stick and slow it down a few months back.
I thought it could be something like that, but the fire stick wasn’t used for at least 15 hours before, and after the first crash I rebooted and restarted the Plex server software. I would have thought that would clear any memory or cache issues.
Self hosting is glorious when it works, and a bit frustrating when it doesn’t. I’m using Emby, and I just finished upgrading from an arm 32-bit, to an Intel N300. It was working great until I relocated the new server to a different location. On boot the USB hard drive was just barely working but super slow. Not sure what the issue was, but it’s working after changing USB ports.
Oh, definitely! I had major issues with the networking in my old house, and just couldn’t narrow it down. I eventually figured out that it was a network switch, but when I tested them, all three had intermittent faults. I could plug my laptop into a port on one and have it lose connection, but plugging something else in would work. Plugging my laptop into a different switch with the same cable would work, but a few hours later would fail. That was a nightmare to track down.
Lol. I feel you. Every single time me and my wife watch something on plex and we tried going backward, plex will most definitely crash. I noticed if i mash the backward button it will definitely crash. If i give it time between pressess its usually works okay.
I always chalk it up to my android tv being having shit processor and low ram. Me and my wife even has a ritual now. Everytime the damn circle spinning takes awhile, we always chant crash crash crash.
Used to own apple tv and it was heaven.The ui is so buttery smooth.
If I was having problems with anything else, I would blame the fire stick. It’s cheaply made Amazon crap that’s designed to fail. I regularly stream to it from other sources though, and don’t get any issues. In this case, I skipped back once, so ten seconds, and that was too much for Plex to handle 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve experienced the same thing on a beefy Synology NAS when watching in my own home network. Methinks Plex needs some work.
Damn. Now i think plex is behind all of this. I always thought it was my tv since everytime i go back to home screen or do anything a little bit faster it always lags like a little bitch. Maybe its both plex and tv.
But then again, I never notice any crash with stremio. Just usual lags.
Yours is even worse. Mine crash when skipped back 20, 30 seconds.
