I too have this problem. I’m using an Nvidia Shield as player.
Have tried it through the web player also with the same result.
When I hit play on a movie, it starts instantly. I can play it through without any issue at all.
As soon as I fast fast forward just a little bit, I get the spinning wheel for a few minutes. Jumping even loner into the movie gives me the wheel even longer. Right now I’m trying to jump in about 1,5 hour into a movie, and I have had the spinning wheel for like 15 minutes now and still no image.
The Shield, the Plex server and my NAS (Qnap TS-419P II) housing the movies are all located in the same network. My Shield uses Direct Play on both video and audio.
Nvidia Shield running the latest Android version as of today.
Plex Media Server running version 1.18.8.2527 on an Ubuntu 18.04 VM inside VMware.
The Qnap NAS is of model TS-419P II running firmware version 4.3.3.1161.
When I have the spinngin wheel, the Plex server is using about 50 % CPU and 1 Gbit/s of ethernet.
The NAS is using about 100 % CPU and also 1 Gbit/s of ethernet.
To me, it seems like the Plex server must somehow go through every bits and bytes of the movie to the point where I have fast forwarded to, before it can start playing.
As I was writing this, I actually got to the point where the CPU and the network of both the Plex server and the NAS went down to idle. At the same time, the Shield started to show a sill image of the movie from where I actually fast forwarded to. However, the movie is still paused and it doesn’t matter how many times I hit the play button, the image is still frozen.
EDIT: Tried with and without subtitles. Same thing…
I’m also having this issue. I’m watching Plex on my Xbox One, version 2.50.1.70. It’s insane – I was 38 minutes into a 45 minute TV show, and now I have to rewatch the first 38 just to see the last 7. Why has this been going on for so many people for years and there’s no solution?
Same as @Zakire, when I was trying to fast forward around to something to not have to watch it all over again, I saw still images from that point, but nothing ever played.
This continues to be an issue for me. I went from a Synology NAS to a more powerful machine with 16gb of RAM and an ssd and the same thing occurs. No improvement.
This is still happening for my on Chrome and Firefox browsers. Its frustrating but once you recognize it its not hard to just close and reopen the stream. It seems really dumb though to just let it spin forever though, maybe add a message after a certain amount of time?
This REALLY needs to be looked at. This is the ONLY problem I currently have with Plex - but it’s a really big problem. If I open the file on the NAS itself, I can seek around the movie anywhere instantly, so it’s not a hard drive speed problem. It happens with both direct stream and converted movies, so it’s not a transcode issue. During the infinite buffering, the Plex server is doing nothing. No CPU activity at all. It’s not transcoding anything. It’s not a performance issue. It just buffers. Forever.
I can attest having an issue wherein rewinding (especially in quick successions) is resulting in a hang of the transcode & direct stream processes. I’ve seen this both on the native macOS desktop app, Firefox, and Nvidia Shield TV; both with hardware transcoding turned on & off.
Running Plex from the Linuxserver.io docker image.
Current PMS version: 1.19.3.2764
Other issues I’ve noticed in the last two updates:
Update
The video finally skipped to the part I wanted during the time it took me to search and write up this post. It’s minutes upon minutes for the server/client to catch up/sync for playback.
But yeah, typically I have to stop/start the stream in order for playback to resume.
This is happening for me also, but only in the browser player. The app on the same computer, or on iOS or Roku, seems to work fine for the same movies. It only starts playing on in the web player after it has downloaded the entire movie. If I subsequently try to skip forward or back, it downloads the entire thing again.
Yep problem is still there for me too. you can see my replies from 2 years ago above. I just got used to not fast forwarding/rewinding while on my desktop. Sad as this is really my only issue with this software. I really wish someone would look into it.
From my dashboard…
Plex Web — Firefox
Buffering—6:38 / 42:52
Local (192.168.1.101)—9 Mbps
Video
1080p (H.264)
Direct Stream
Audio
English (EAC3 5.1)
AAC—Transcode
Id be happy to share my server logs with any admin if they respond to this.
I’m going to change my answer from before… it used to be that if you went directly to the PMS (web client on the same network) it would happen very quickly but not if you used plex.tv/launch link … even on the home network.
Now it’s happening on the plex.tv/launch as well.
I’m also using the docker linuxserver
Running Plex from the Linuxserver.io docker image.
Current PMS version: 1.19.3.2764
Web Client version: 4.33.1
If you’re using Direct Stream and it’s still happening to you then really it doesn’t have anything to do with the transcoder which I thought was the issue?
Yep, still a problem here too. And of course Plex continues to ignore its users. (“Fix a bug people have been complaining about for years? Why would we want to do that??”)
