I’m hoping someone can offer some concrete suggestions on how to troubleshoot my setup.
My Plex setup has been working flawlessly for years. No playback stalls, no buffering. Just rock solid playback on all devices both local and remote.
My setup:
Plex Server 1: Windows 10 box running PMS connected to remote storage (Samba shares on a RAID array connected to a linux box)
Plex Server 2: Nvidia Shield TV Pro connected to an HD Homerun Connect. Content stored on Shield’s local storage.
Playback devices: Mix of Roku 4 and Roku 3 boxes.
All devices are hardwired with Cat 6 cable connected to a Gigabit router.
As I mentioned at the top of the post, this has been working flawlessly for years. My troubles started when I replaced my Netgear R7000 Nighthawk (running DD-WRT) with an ASUS AC86U (running ASUSWRT-Merlin). Now, I get constant buffering after around 7 to 10 minutes of playback no matter what device (Roku 4, Roku 3, or web player) I use or where the content is coming from (Plex Server 1 or Plex Server 2). Direct play is enabled for all devices.
I’m reasonably sure that the problem is some router setting but I’m stumped as to where to look or what to try. I’ve tried enabling/disabling QoS and prioritising video streaming all to no avail.
OK. Update.
I’m ready to rule out any network hardware or router settings as the culprit here.
As an experiment, I installed Emby server on the same PC that was running Plex. I created new libraries on the Emby server and pointed them at the same Samba shares that Plex was using. My Roku 3 and Roku 4 boxes have so far been able to playback multiple titles with no playback stalls at all.
I’m thinking now that the act of changing my router caused some sort of data mismatch/corruption in the Plex library files (some of my servers did end up with a new IP address). I’m wondering if perhaps recreating all of the Plex libraries from scratch might clear things up.
Is there a way to to a “factory reset” on Plex servers to cause them to delete all of their library configuration and metadata and start over from scratch?
I recently upgraded to the Asus RT-AC86U, and it appears I’m getting brutally slow speeds within my Wifi network - constant buffering even though I’ve got a 300+ mbps pipe verified by Speedtest. Obviously something is going on and it didn’t exist with the Linksys router I had before…
I did a bit more investigation in an attempt to get to the bottom of things.
When I disconnected my internal network from the internet, I was able to get playback on the Roku devices to work flawlessly when streaming from either Plex server. But as soon as I put my network back online, I found that the Rokus would revert to going out to an external connection (over the Internet) rather than sticking with an internal, direct connection to the server and the buffering would return.
I was never able to figure out why this was happening nor could I find any setting that would fix things. Oddly, I didn’t get any playback stalls when I played content on my Nvidia Shield TV (as the client). So I ended up replacing all of my Rokus with Nvidia Shield TVs and everything works well. I haven’t looked back.
Good luck and if you do figure out what the issue is, please be sure to post your discovery. I’d still like to get to the bottom of this one.
