I have been unable to watch any video, high resolution or not, from my PMS on either my 2013 Samsung smart TV Plex app, or the app for my Amazon Fire Stick for some time now. When any video starts, I get the message ‘Your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video. Check your network or try a lower quality.’ I am only dealing with the Fire Stick app at the moment, I have set video quality to automatic on the app, but I am still getting the message. So my question is, where do I go in my PMS settings to configure bandwidth manually?
If you are watching on the local lan, there is no server bandwidth restrictions.
If you are watching from a remote connection, then the upload bandwidth is @ Plex Web > settings > remote access > upload speed
Otherwise to troubleshoot your issues, you will need to reproduce the issue and save the logs and drop them in a reply.
You can also post a screenshot of the plex web > settings > dashboard while trying to play a problem video, this will help identify if the server is even seeing the video attempting to play, whether it is transcoding, and whether the server thinks the client is local or remote.
you can save the logs @ plex web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs
That app was user contributed. Unfortunately, he is no longer able to maintain the app. The app has not been updated in quite some time, so inconsistent results can be expected. You may be better off using a streaming device such as FireTV, Roku, AppleTV, Nvidia Shield, etc.
This is the status of the current settings as you recommended. With the same message '‘Your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video. Check your network or try a lower quality.’ at the start of playback, with constant freezes from then on.
The only “solution” I have found so far was to change the ‘Home Streaming Quality’ setting on the Fire Stick to 720p, with ‘Adjust Quality Automatically’ set to off. This resulted in almost no stuttering or freezing of the stream, but there is obviously a drop in video quality. I would like to know how to identify if this is a limitation of my home WiFi, (the Fire Stick does not have an ethernet option), or of my iMac’s CPU (Quad Core 2.7GHz i7).
Direct Play is good. PMS is streaming the audio & video unaltered to the FireStick.
Check your network. Hopefully the iMac is connected via wired Ethernet. Check the WiFi signal level for the FireStick (in FireStick settings). Does it say the network connection is OK?
The iMac should not be the problem. It is more than capable, especially when direct playing movies (i.e. not transcoding, which puts additional load on CPU).
While direct playing a movie, check the CPU utilization on the iMac. Make sure something isn’t slamming the CPU. The Plex processes should be very low.
Thanks for your reply. Right now I cannot connect my iMac via ethernet simply because of the physical location of our internet access point and the desk the iMac is sitting on. I have two Airport Expresses which I will try setting up in client mode (one with a wired connection to the router, and the other with a wired connection to the iMac), I am pretty dumb when it comes to networking so I have no idea if that will work, but if it does I will report back on this thread. There is no issue with CPU usage on the Mac, it is currently transcoding a 1080p video and using less than 1.0 percent of processor bandwidth.
So based on comments from users on other forums, adding Airport Express to the network in client mode won’t work. Now I’m thinking I could try a direct wired connection from the Mac to the Fire Stick, enabling Internet Sharing in System Preferences. What I don’t understand is if that would change the routing of the stream from my PMS to the Fire Stick or if it would still go over the wireless network.
