I have same issue. My Plex server is running on a Windows10 Pro machine (i7, 32 GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, no bottlenecks when I look at the statistics in Plex).
When I play video files (using EVP, no transcoding) on the apple TV4k (LAN connection), it reads in the buffer at a very low speed.
Using the same network, and same server, same video file, changing from the Apple TV 4k to the native Plex app in my TV LG WebOS instead - It just worked (no buffer issues).
Tried same video file with other Plex clients (same Server) accross several other platform like IOS (iPhone XR) iPadOS (iPad Air latest gen) and on MacOS (Catalina 10.15.4) without any issue.
I think the issue is isolated to the Plex client on the Apple TV 4k?
The issue, and the reason for starting this post, is that playing video on the Apple TV Plex app with EVP enabled causes this “trickle” of buffering problem. As far as I know, EVP is only an option on Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV), and when EVP is enabled on any of those Apple devices in my household, I get the buffering issue. Playback on Windows PCs with the Plex application play just fine. And I also want to say that, with EVP disabled on the Apple devices, playback is fine as well. It’s just that in the past (before my first post back in February), playback with EVP enabled on my Apple TVs worked really well, and I do enjoy the benefits of the Enhanced Video Player.
I was really interested to see v2.17 of the Apple TV Plex app today for the following reason:
NEW:
The Enhanced Video Player is now available to all users and enabled by default. It can be disabled at any time from the app Advanced Settings.
After updating to 2.17, I tried a video with EVP enabled, and unfortunately ran into the same buffering issue. Changing the setting is a little different now in the Apple TV app. Now that option is listed in the Advanced section as “Use Old Video Player”. Because I still have the buffering issue, I have to leave that setting as On.
Now not only is EVP enabled by default, it’s now an option for Plex users, whether you have Plex Pass or not. It makes me wonder if more people are going to run into this buffering issue now.
Thank god someone else is reporting this. Much like some of the users here I migrated from 2012R2 to 2019 recently and noticed this horrible buffering. I have a 4 port LAG for my network connections and it’s on a server with plenty enough resources.
By dumb luck I switched to the old player but some of my media isn’t playing through it. Sigh, this sucks. Hoping there is a fixed released in the near future or its time to think about moving to another application. For further information I’m streaming from a mix of Apple TV’s, one 4K and the rest are the generation before the 4K model. If it’s on the new player the buffering starts almost instantly.
Yes, I assume that’s what’s gonna happen. Let’s see if either the server team or me can squeeze some time to dig into this problem soon
FYI if you tweak the tvOS closed captions settings, those should be reflected in the Enhanced Video Player (and if it doesn’t, that’s probably a bug ).
If there is any specific subtitle customization that doesn’t work, @gnuaha7 might be able to help with that
Regarding the original issue in this thread with Windows Server 2019, I’ve installed that OS in a virtual machine and I’ve been able to reproduce the problem. I’ll keep you posted…
Seems like incidentally the upcoming beta version of the iOS/tvOS app includes a fix for a totally different (but at the same time similar) issue, and has improved the behavior with Windows Server 2019.
Those betas will be out in the next hours, in case someone signed up for betas and wants to give it a try.
I still don’t understand why this difference, I’ll compare to Plex Desktop and see why this happens.
I can reproduce the problem with Plex Desktop too (which under the hood uses the same video player as the iOS and tvOS apps). Let’s see if I use mpv directly…
Sorry for so many messages, just want to keep you up-to-date with my investigation
I just tested it on Plex Desktop and mpv for Windows, it worked perfectly. Basically what I see with all theses mpv-based players is:
On Apple platforms (iOS/tvOS/macOS), download bandwidth starts peaking at some high number like 200-300Mbps, then after a while it slows down and stays stable somewhere between 1-2Mbps, which eventually makes playback stall.
On Windows, download bandwidth starts peaking as well, but then when it slows down it oscillates between 3 and 15 Mbps and playback never stalls.
No idea what’s this difference in behavior, but I assume it’s in the different network code of mpv/ffmpeg for Apple platforms vs other platforms.
That’s all for now/today. Even though it seems like the upcoming iOS/tvOS beta improves this behavior, we’ll look into it in case there is something else wrong under the hood.
I managed to get signed up for Plex beta again via Testflight a couple of days ago. I tried the current beta (2.18 I think), and unfortunately I still get the buffering issue with EVP enabled. Hopefully the devs are still looking into the issue. I really don’t want to have to change my server’s OS from Windows Server 2019.
Is this issue truly limited to a Windows server + Apple clients? IE, if I run a Linux based pms, should these issues disappear?
For me, this is agonizing, as I’ve switched my entire library to 4K HDR. What I’ve found out is using Infuse Pro to stream works much better than the Plex app, but I shouldn’t HAVE to do this.
I’m looking forward to the newer Apple TV that’s due soon, but I’m really concerned that this problem will remain.
I’m just very frustrated that my Nvidia Shield has absolutely no issues playing anything I can throw at it… but I don’t want to use it because I’m trying to get everything google and amazon out of my house… sigh…
Just wanted to add myself to the growing number of people having this issue.
Running server 2019 in a VM. Everything was working fine until a reboot. Only apple clients are affected.
I discovered this issue by watching the networking graph in task manger while streaming to an atv4k client and comparing to a windows client. My library is located on a network share and strangely enough plex seems to continue reading the file but not sending it to the client (at least that is what I concluded from my rudimentary observations) I hope this issue will be resolved soon.
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