Buffering remote server play via 360 app but not other players

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
1

I have both a local PMS and a secure connection to a friend’s PMS located outside my network. When I try to play content from the remote PMS via my Xbox 360 Plex app, I get buffering on all content, including music. On video I can throttle playback down to 320kb/s and get fewer skips. If I play the same content via different device (phone, laptop, etc.), I can play with no buffering at a much higher bitrate. Is this something inherent in the Xbox app? My friend’s remote server I believe is a Drobo NAS… is it a transcoding issue for whatever his PMS thinks is required for my Xbox? Based on other players with similar connectivity being able to show it successfully, it doesn’t seem to be bandwidth related. I can understand video buffering may happen due to all the different potential formats etc., but I get this even on Xbox music playback from the remote PMS.

Is there any intermediate staging system? Can I use Plex to sync some files to my PMS from the remote PMS then playback on the Xbox? The Xbox app doesn’t seem to support sync locally, i.e. storing files on the Xbox drive ahead of time then playing and de’sync later.

2

Perhaps poor etiquette to be the only response to your own question, but I never made any headway on this issue. Eventually I bought a Chromecast and don’t seem to have any problems using that, casting music to the Chromecast via Plex app on an Android phone connected to the same remote server as noted. Using this approach I have no buffering, so it seems it is either a limitation of the Xbox hardware, the Xbox Plex app (which seems to have been stuck on version 1.0.0.0 since it was released), or a combination. Xbox seems to have various issues with Plex channels as well, as I was never able to get TuneIn, Shoutcast, Soma, CBS, or other channels to play via the Xbox app. It’s a bit disappointing since (https://www.plex.tv/apps/tvs-consoles/xbox-360/) seems to say that all of this is possible.