I am having some gnarly buffering every 2-5 seconds recently on most things i watch. Usually when I am watching, there is no one else watching as well. My server is at a remote location with a 100d/50-100u connection.
Apple TV’s are at my apartment less than 30 miles away with a 200d/12u connection. One has a wired connection and the other two are wireless less than 25 ft from the router. I get constant buffering when set at 8 Mbps 1080p or anything atm really.
I tried uninstalling the server, restarted the computer, reinstalled Plex, tried turning off direct play and direct stream and force transcodes because the server processor is a intel 5820k with benchmark of around 12k and has plenty of power. That helped for a couple days but its back to being a pain in the rear.
What is weird is none of my friends have these issues, just me.
I’m wondering what I can do. Any help is appreciated so i can finally get back to loving plex!
If it is just you getting issues, with the same media and same type of clients, then we can assume that the actual Plex server in itself is doing just fine. I’d start poking your network. If it is possible, I’d try and connect your ATV directly to the modem or such (bypass the router) and see if that makes any difference. If not, I’d start using tools such as Pingplotter, do some trace on the connection between you and the server and see if either ISP might be to blame.
Are you getting buffering on the wired machine? I would investigate wireless interference first. Apartments can have a lot of access points and a lot of interference going on.
Thanks for the responses. I am going to go out on a limb here and say it may be something with my ISP.
I have gone through these issues with: Xbox One S, Roku 4k, Roku Ultra, 3 Apple tv’s, Vizio tablet cast and Samsung tv all both wired and wireless at some point. All get buffering issues at some point but other times will work just fine even with the quality set to original, guess it just decides to get out of bed on the right side.
Idk if it is because I had the server at my apartment for a couple months before moving it and Comcast didn’t like me downloading 4Tb of data and put some voodoo magic on my account or what.
As I am not the most tech-savvy in regards to really troubleshooting network issues, besides pingplotter, what should I be looking at to test and what am I looking for? High ping between the server and Comcast or something?
Latency is one factor to take into account, yes. Actual download speed and the routing table another. Are both client and server on same ISP, comcast? If such, that can cause issues too (yeah, really, not kidding) depending on how they’ve setup their internal network (likely vertical topology). When things buffer in Plex I’d try and just download the file from the server and see what speeds you get.
Network issues that stems from / lies within the ISP are rarely easy to solve and requires quite a lot of effort and patience to get the right ISP technician on it. Gather as much data as you can with tools such as Pingplotter, see if you can try and get som hard evidence to the issue at hand. Sadly, a “things buffer in Plex” most likely won’t suffice to get you past the first line support.
Apartment is Comcast, server is Centurylink. I mean its part of the game I guess, its just weird because i never had these issues up until a month or so ago.
I am going to try to get a Centurylink tech out to the server location because i have a fiber connection there and i used to have about 600d/450u but i made a mistake and changed the speed and have never gotten that since.
Sigh…nothing works. Couldnt even watch something on 480p if i wanted. Yet the other day i had 2 tvs set to original quality and one on 10 mbps to run a test and they worked the entire day.
@Peter_W said:
Latency is one factor to take into account, yes. Actual download speed and the routing table another. Are both client and server on same ISP, comcast? If such, that can cause issues too (yeah, really, not kidding) depending on how they’ve setup their internal network (likely vertical topology). When things buffer in Plex I’d try and just download the file from the server and see what speeds you get.
Network issues that stems from / lies within the ISP are rarely easy to solve and requires quite a lot of effort and patience to get the right ISP technician on it. Gather as much data as you can with tools such as Pingplotter, see if you can try and get som hard evidence to the issue at hand. Sadly, a “things buffer in Plex” most likely won’t suffice to get you past the first line support.
I work for an MSP and even with a direct number to several VP’s…Comcast still is ■■■■ to work with when it comes to networking issues.
Another thing i occasionally see is other network traffic hurting your connection.
I am not talking about just bandwidth!
A simple torrent download can cause a router to open up a lot of connections and i’ve seen this lead to problems on multiple ISP provided devices. You might find a router SNMP metric that correlates with the problem timestamps.
So in this case a simple big download would work and fast, but something that reestablishes a connection periodically wil have to wait until a connection is available. In some cases, the router even crashes and wil work fine for a short while after a reset.
