When watching a LiveTV stream remotely on a Roku client, I’m seeing lots of buffering (spinny circle and pauses playing) going on every 5 - 10 seconds when trying to watch any LiveTV streams. When I’m logged into the server web page, the ‘Now Playing’ tile for this stream updates it’s status between ‘Playing’ and ‘Buffering’ every 5-10 seconds. Some other various notes:
The Rokus in my house work fine for live TV without buffering
Streaming movies to this remote Roku work fine without any buffering, so it doesn’t seem to be a bandwidth issue
Any ideas what to check here? What would the LiveTV transcoding be doing differently then transcoding a movie?
I was having this problem the other day. I had my HDHomerun tuner set to transcode. I turned it off. Hoping that would help. It was really hard to watch hockey with all the buffering.
It sounds like the server is trying to transcode for remote streams and not for local streams. If that’s the case it sounds like then your hardware can’t keep up with the job of transcoding in the fly. Recorded TV streams use a really old format that can be difficult for most servers to transcode when needed.
It really shouldn’t be a big deal for my server to transcode, as it’s a brand new build with i5-8600k and 16GB ram. I took a look while it was streaming, and CPU never got above about 30% .
I’m having the same problem on a remote Xbox One. Shouldn’t be a bandwidth problem, since i have 500/500 connection, and theres a 60 mbit connection remote.
Update: So I swapped out the (free) Roku Express I was trying to use on the TV with a Roku 3 that I also had, and now the buffering problem is gone! Somehow, it was an issue with the Roku client’s Live TV functionality running on that cheap Roku Express. The older, but apparently more powerful Roku 3 works fine! So it was either the slower processor, or the lack of 5Ghz wi-fi that caused the poor performance.
