Always needing to buffer :\

General Discussions
1

Hi,

So my entire time with Plex has been hit or miss with how things play, sometimes great sometimes just horrible. Lately its been more on the horrible side.

I have a dedicated Mac Mini Dual core i5 that only has Plex on it and it grabs the files from my Synology NAS. They are both connected to the same switch as well.

When streaming to Plex Web or PMP it works great, however when streaming to my PS4 or Vizio TV it plays fine and then pauses and then plays.

I can’t pinpoint where exactly is the bottleneck. My processes usage is never always at 100% it goes in intervals of 100% then 10%. Same with it reading data from the NAS, it reads in intervals and never continuously. It almost feels like it doesn’t grab the data fast enough, is there any way to increase the amount it caches from the server?

Here is processor usage

and network

2

Update:

So I found that when I lower the resolution/quality it works fine which doesn’t make sense since I am on a LAN connection and it should technically be more burden on the server :S

3

how are the PS4 and the TV connected to your network ?

4

@starbetrayer said:
how are the PS4 and the TV connected to your network ?

The PS4 is connected to a switch and the switch is connected to my router.

This has started happening when using Plex Web too. The video will pause and say my server is not powerful enough but then I login to the server it shows it is constantly grabbing the data but not processing it.

So its downloading data from my NAS at 20MB/s for a whole min or more but the processor usage only ever stays at 15%

5

What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

6

@starbetrayer said:
What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

Router is: Asus RT-AC68U
Switch is: TP Link TL-SG1005D

Both are gigabit capable and all cables are atleast Cat 5e.
I uploaded the log in the first post, but have also put the newer ones in this post.

I enabled Debug & Verbose logging, not sure if that helps or not?

And thanks for the assistance

7

I want to rule out something first.
How much free space do you have on the mac mini ?
Is the transcoder folder selected to point to the hard drive of the mac mini ?
How big is the file you are trying to read vs the free space on the drive of the mac mini ?

8

@Crzyrio said:

@starbetrayer said:
What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

Router is: Asus RT-AC68U
Switch is: TP Link TL-SG1005D

Both are gigabit capable and all cables are atleast Cat 5e.
I uploaded the log in the first post, but have also put the newer ones in this post.

I enabled Debug & Verbose logging, not sure if that helps or not?

And thanks for the assistance

Looking at your logs from this sample you have multiple occurrences where the speed value drops below 1.0, this will cause buffering.

See: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201575036-Why-is-my-video-stream-buffering-

9

Additionally, this thread about excess heat with the Mini may be relevant

10

@starbetrayer said:
I want to rule out something first.
How much free space do you have on the mac mini ?
Is the transcoder folder selected to point to the hard drive of the mac mini ?
How big is the file you are trying to read vs the free space on the drive of the mac mini ?

There is about 70GB free and the files are no more than 1-3GB. I just left the directory blank, should I put it somewhere?

11

@hthighway said:

@Crzyrio said:

@starbetrayer said:
What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

Router is: Asus RT-AC68U
Switch is: TP Link TL-SG1005D

Both are gigabit capable and all cables are atleast Cat 5e.
I uploaded the log in the first post, but have also put the newer ones in this post.

I enabled Debug & Verbose logging, not sure if that helps or not?

And thanks for the assistance

Looking at your logs from this sample you have multiple occurrences where the speed value drops below 1.0, this will cause buffering.

See: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201575036-Why-is-my-video-stream-buffering-

Thanks for the input but as I mentioned, the transcoder doesn’t even kick in. My CPU is always less than 20% when this happens and temperature hovers around 60 so that shouldn’t be a problem.

12

@starbetrayer said:
I want to rule out something first.
How much free space do you have on the mac mini ?
Is the transcoder folder selected to point to the hard drive of the mac mini ?
How big is the file you are trying to read vs the free space on the drive of the mac mini ?

So I did a hard restart of everything, NAS. Mini, PS4 and everything seems to be better now, even the web player is smoother.

I would like to still find the root cause but will be harder now. The log does look very different now as well.
I also updated PLEX and PS4 firmware, not sure if one of those fixed the problem?

I attached the log incase ya wanted to see the diff

13

@Crzyrio said:

@hthighway said:

@Crzyrio said:

@starbetrayer said:
What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

Router is: Asus RT-AC68U
Switch is: TP Link TL-SG1005D

Both are gigabit capable and all cables are atleast Cat 5e.
I uploaded the log in the first post, but have also put the newer ones in this post.

I enabled Debug & Verbose logging, not sure if that helps or not?

And thanks for the assistance

Looking at your logs from this sample you have multiple occurrences where the speed value drops below 1.0, this will cause buffering.

See: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201575036-Why-is-my-video-stream-buffering-

Thanks for the input but as I mentioned, the transcoder doesn’t even kick in. My CPU is always less than 20% when this happens and temperature hovers around 60 so that shouldn’t be a problem.

So if your assertion is that the transcoder isn’t being used, why post a log that shows the transcoder being used?

14

@hthighway said:

@Crzyrio said:

@hthighway said:

@Crzyrio said:

@starbetrayer said:
What is the model of your switch and router ?

Could you upload Plex Media Server.log ?

Router is: Asus RT-AC68U
Switch is: TP Link TL-SG1005D

Both are gigabit capable and all cables are atleast Cat 5e.
I uploaded the log in the first post, but have also put the newer ones in this post.

I enabled Debug & Verbose logging, not sure if that helps or not?

And thanks for the assistance

Looking at your logs from this sample you have multiple occurrences where the speed value drops below 1.0, this will cause buffering.

See: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201575036-Why-is-my-video-stream-buffering-

Thanks for the input but as I mentioned, the transcoder doesn’t even kick in. My CPU is always less than 20% when this happens and temperature hovers around 60 so that shouldn’t be a problem.

So if your assertion is that the transcoder isn’t being used, why post a log that shows the transcoder being used?

Sorry, what I meant was the transcoder isn’t using the full potential of the CPU as the CPU usage was sitting at 20% and not 100%. This is why its buffering, yes but I want to know why its not using 100% CPU and throttling the transcoder.

15

Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

16

@hthighway said:
Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

Sorry, your going to have to help me out here. Where can I find this XML?

It happened on almost everything, but I can post the XML for a few of them.

17

@Crzyrio said:

@hthighway said:
Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

Sorry, your going to have to help me out here. Where can I find this XML?

It happened on almost everything, but I can post the XML for a few of them.

See this link:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201998867-Investigate-Media-Information-and-Formats

18

@hthighway said:
Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

are you suspecting VC-1 codec ?

19

@starbetrayer said:

@hthighway said:
Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

are you suspecting VC-1 codec ?

That would be the easiest answer :slight_smile:

20

@hthighway said:

@Crzyrio said:

@hthighway said:
Can you post the XML of the media being used that causes the buffering issue?

Sorry, your going to have to help me out here. Where can I find this XML?

It happened on almost everything, but I can post the XML for a few of them.

See this link:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201998867-Investigate-Media-Information-and-Formats

Thanks and sorry for the late reply. For some reason I get a blank page on Safari when trying to view XML.

As i mentioned though, this happened with multiple files and most of my files are in .mp4/.mkv container and video is usualy h264. Ive attached 2 of them that had trouble playing.

I zipped them, since it wouldnt allow for xml’s to be attached.

As i mentioned earlier though, it appears as though the problem was fixed with all the updates? Also I recently found this:

looks like the Mini is throttled when not attached to a monitor, will give this a try just to see.