Apple TV has been working fine for at least a year until yesterday when it started pausing playback for a second or so and then playing again for a second or so. It continues to do this constantly. I checked the dashboard and whenever it stops it says it’s buffering.
The file being player is 700 MB or less and shouldn’t be too bandwidth intensive. The server is remote but videos play fine on my phone with the plex app and on my windows machine with the plex app. I tested this by playing the same files and even bigger files up to 20G. All the devices are on the same WiFi and all of them are Direct playing. On the Apple TV other streaming services work fine ( Netflix and Amazon Prime) so I don’t think it’s the WIFI/Bandwith issue on the Apple TV.
Another thing I should mention is that sometimes, but not always, if I restart the Apple TV or Kill the plex app exactly one episode or movie will play fine but as soon as it changes to the next episode it’s starts buffering again.
I have tried rebooting the apple tv, rebooting the server, uninstalling the app and reinstalling but the issue persists.
Did you have any success in fixing this? Friend of mine who I share my server with started having issues around the same time as you and all I can see if buffering from my side despite their being plenty of bandwidth.
He used to have the least issues but something seems to have changed, he can get some films to play by enabling the new player (which requires him to buy a plex pass which seems off considering Android has got the latest player for free) but its still a lot buggier than it used to be.
Other clients (Android, Samsung) still work fine so just seems to be the Apple TV that is playing up.
Edit: I think our issues might be a little different, he can’t get the video to play at all. Just says buffering on my end and he gets nothing.
This started happening to me today. I was trying to stream a 10Mbps video and watching the dashboard, I could see that the server was only transmitting at ~5-8Mbps, so it kept buffering and telling me I didn’t have enough BW.
Disconnecting the Ethernet cable from the Apple TV and switching to wifi solved it for me. Ethernet port is limited to 100Mbps anyway, and my wifi is 800Mbps. Not that it should matter when the media is only 10Mbps…
The change on the Plex server dashboard BW graph was immediate. Rather than being a slow-n-low 5-8Mbps stream, when I restarted playback with the ATV on wifi, it was an immediate 300Mbps spike for a few seconds and then nothing until it needed to buffer more again.
I think it’s an ATV bug rather than a Plex bug, as I had the same problem with MrMC (although that was also streaming from a Plex server)
I think @Puzzled issue is different as he said but @deepseth issue sounds more like what was happening to me. MY issue ended up being related to the location of my server (Germany). Changing my server to a US location solved the issue immediately. Something must have changed along the path from my house to the server in Germany. Tried a bunch of different things and the only thing that worked was moving the server.
