Server Version#: 1.21.0.3616
Player Version#: 8.10.0.21911 (9219e3c2)
If we pause a movie when using Watch Together sometimes I will get severe audio distortion, but only on my client my friend is unaffected, it doesn’t happen every time but when it does the only way to fix it seems to be for me to quit out of the session and enter back in which sometimes fixes it while sometimes the issue reappears after a short period (within a minute usually).
The way the audio distortion behaves varies a bit from time to time, sometimes it sounds like a bunch of audio tracks mixed together with a bunch of static noise added on top, sometimes its just static at max volume. The first time it happened I thought my tv was about to explode due to it maxing out the volume.
I have not been able to recreate this issue sitting in a Watch Together session by myself, it only seems to happen when actually watching with someone else but I think I managed to grab the correct logs when it happened today.
I recently kind of confirmed that this doesn’t seem to have to do with the audio codec.
The movies I first encountered this on was using DTS 7.1. I have since re-encoded all those movies to AC3 stereo since I found some references to DTS causing trouble for some people but today I experienced the same problem again with the re-encoded files.
It also seems to occur when seeking.
Same issue here.
Happens in Watch Together session when seeking. Loud (max volume) distorsions only on my end. Happens with movies and tv shows. Again the only way to fix it is for me to leave the Watch Together session, force kill stream session and go back to the Watch Together session.
I experienced this on my Shield TV and Android mobile.
I had tried Watch Together to get the same video playing in two rooms while going back and forth doing stuff around the house. Happened regularly to me as well. I stopped using the Watch Together feature and found another non-Plex way to accomplish the goal.
This happens to me on an nvidia Shield TV using the latest plex-pass docker and available app on the play store. It doesn’t matter what file format we’re watching (avi SD to BluRay) but if somebody skips around or pauses it we’ll get hit with an amplified blast of white noise that is nearly deafening when the video was being played at a reasonable volume.
Worse even is that when it happens using the 10s skip forward will sometimes cause additive skips (10s, 20s, 30s, 50s, 80s) that pausing doesn’t fix. Rejoining doesn’t fix. When both issues occur you’ve gotta send a new invite and then skip to where you were and pray it doesn’t happen again.
It’s made it almost unusable because it interrupts the viewing experience for everybody and is scary as eff when you’re watching a movie at night.
I am also experiencing this issue. I am fairly confident it did not happen until recently (past month or 2) as we used ‘Watch Together’ without ever experiencing prior.
So far it seems to be that the person watching ‘remotely’ from another location will not experience the white noise blast of static, while myself streaming local will be hit with it. When I look at the setup I see I am doing DirectPlay from my Synology to the Amazon 4K Fire Stick and they are streaming with HW transcode to iOS device.
Sometimes the static will clear after a relatively short period of time, say under a minute. Other times it persists longer and we give up and start the WT session again.
We have also noticed a lot more issues with the stream buffering or having issues. Again, this has never been a problem before till recently. As an example, last night watching a film it was fine till near the end and then it just kept stopping and giving me static and issues. It seemed to play fine for them at times but we couldn’t get more than a couple minutes before having to start again to resolve the problem.
There was also the odd message that vanished quickly about the system not being able to handle the load - viewing metrics the CPU was ~20% and memory/IO didn’t look any different to normal.
Apologies for such a lengthy reply - just want to add my piece to this because we never had this many problems until recently. The only thing I am aware of that has changed is the Plex server side software and potentially client side (FireStick, iOS etc).
So its been a bit over two months since my initial post and still no word from anyone working at PLEX which is getting kind of frustrating especially since this is one of the features I’m paying to use!
Could we at least get an acknowledgement that the issue has been noted by someone in the dev team!?
I’ll happily provide any additional information for hunting this bug down since I want to be able to use the feature especially in these pandemic times!
Watch Together is a fantastic feature when it works as advertised but this bug literally puts you into panic mode every time you get it and makes every session a gamble!
