I’ve noticed a bunch of random threads pop up in the past few weeks about buffering and re-buffering. I hadn’t used Plex in about 3 months due to travel and relocating from California to Oregon. After setting up all my gadgets, I updated to PMS 1.7.2 as the first thing on my to-do list. Now it seems that I can’t play anything more than about 6 megabits/sec. I thought it was my Roku at first (see: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/276879/lots-of-rebuffering-on-roku-3), but noticed that it’s the same with my Nexus Player, it just stutters and drops frames instead of re-buffering. If I force video downsampling to 720p @ 4 megabits/sec, I can play anything. I watched two movies with higher original bitrates (11 and 14 mb/s) without any hiccups.
Logs and hardware details are in the other thread. But the short of it is that I have a wired, gigabit connection, but can’t use more than 0.6% of it with Plex.
To me, that sounds like as if the data travels outside your network and back. Thus I would start investigating the router (I assume you got a new one when you moved). Especially the DNS rebinding and/or isolation of clients (mostly used by wireless but I’d check that regardless).
If you just updated your server and the clients, there have been changes to the quality settings which could definitely impact playback. Have you looked at the quality settings in the client apps?
Hmm, I can’t imagine that the data would leave my local network. I have the same Netgear Nighthawk that I had before I moved. My modem is in bridge mode so I’m not using any of the NAT or WiFi services Comcast provides. I didn’t change any settings on my Nighthawk before or after my move. I literally plugged it in after enabling bridge mode on my new modem and it picked up an IP via DHCP from Comcast. I didn’t have to adjust anything on any device since all the settings are the same on my Nighthawk. I’ve always used Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). Wireless isolation only applies to guest networks (according to Netgear’s settings).
As far as the clients go, the apps would have auto-updated when they came back online and detected an Internet connection. The quality settings were previously set to play original bitrates, and that worked fine before. Now, I have to force quality down to 4mb/s before it’ll play.
The idea that data is looping out and back is intriguing, but I have no idea how that would happen when it didn’t before. I used to play 20mb/s movies when I had things wired up the way they are now.
Have you reviewed the new quality settings in the app settings? There are different settings for internet, local, etc, and there’s the automatic quality setting as well. I had to tweak them to get streaming to function as I want it.
Okay, I’ve been experimenting all afternoon with this. It’s something in the playback engine. I didn’t know about the new quality settings in the player apps. I don’t see any automatic setting though. The list shows Original, 20 mb/s, 12 mb/s, and on down.
I disabled remote access in PMS and checked every setting in my Nighthawk router to make sure that it wasn’t transmitting data outside of my network. I also tried various movies to double check. I have 10mb/s upload with Comcast. And was able to play back a movie encoded at just under 23 mb/s without any hiccups (Return of The Jedi). But trying various other movies, I get mixed results. Some play back fine some re-buffer. They ranged in bitrate from about 7 to 23 mb/s. But in every case, if I just forced it to downsample to the next lower tier, it played back fine. So Plex’s transcoded codec is perfectly happy. Even a 23->20 mb/s transcode played smoothly. So I was wrong about the bitrate being a factor.
What makes me think that it’s the playback engine is that I also tested a movie that I know I had previously watched on my Roku through Plex, and it now hiccups (Saving Private Ryan). So now I gotta figure out what encoding settings are good and what aren’t (and I didn’t take any notes for any of my rips). Sigh…
