I love watching upcoming movie trailers whenever I go to the movies and am glad that the new Plex channel/server has it. I know most people don’t use it but I do want to play a few trailers before watching my movie, to sort of feel like a movie house, but the experience is ruined by the buffering. I understand the buffering is coming from internet, but is it possible to just have the buffering at the start.
To illustrate, if I wanted 3 trailers before my movie,
Plex can retrieve the first trailer,
buffer at the start to store trailer 1 to cache,
delay start of trailer 1 at roku,
play trailer 1,
start retrieving/load trailer 2 store to cache while trailer 1 is still playing
start trailer 2 after trailer 1 is finished with data already retrieved
start retrieving/load trailer 3 store to cache while trailer 2 is still playing
start trailer 3 after trailer 2 is finished with data already retrieved
start retrieving movie store to cache while trailer 3 is still playing
start movie after trailer 3 is finished with data already retrieved
This way, the only buffering that I will see is the first one. Everything will look seamless. Hope this can be done.
You shouldn’t have buffering issues unless (in general, depending on the client) your online media playback quality is set higher than what you can sustain. What client are you using to view these trailers where you see buffering?
Before this topic I thought about creating my own topic, basically same buffering issue, but my idea is going a little further.
For the Movies that you actually have in your library it would be nice to download them with this Trailer function just once and then store it locally.
Especially with lower bandwidths this would be very helpful as you could get higher quality trailers, mine look kinda fuzzy on the big screen.
Also for the upcoming movie trailers there could be like a “pool” folder on the Plex server where always several new Trailers are stored & replaced after they have been randomly been played before a movie.
This is a nice idea, unfortunately this is not how streaming works, especially if you are able to direct play an item. You cannot cache the next item ahead of time. Another option that could work but would require the trailers to be transcoded is to have the transcoder combine all the trailers into 1 long file. So instead of 3 trailers, you would get 1 really long trailer that has 3 items in it. You wouldn’t be able to skip individual trailers, just FF through them.
@Ardego said:
For the Movies that you actually have in your library it would be nice to download them with this Trailer function just once and then store it locally.
The trailer come from a commercial site that Plex has licensed. I don’t think they would take too kindly to having people keeping their trailers.
I am not sure if this will help but I remember when trailers were announced that they allowed for you to add your own local trailers, I know it’s more work to download the trailers yourself, but if you are having a poor experience with trailers it could be an alternative. The best way to get the trailers would likely be to use a tool like youtube-dl.
The idea of caching does not counter the idea of streaming, because like regular streaming you cache a littile bit first before starting the video. This is the same with caching the succeeding trailers and actual video, you can start the stream (caching) of the 2nd trailer even before the first trailer is done playing.
I also like the idea of having the plex server having a way to store trailers, we can set the number of trailers to store and the Plex server can do it on a scheduled time when no one is using the bandwidth. Replace the trailers at a scheduled interval, and use that as a pool for getting the trailers. Anyway, I notice the Plex server always gets the same trailers over and over, so that would mean streaming the same trailer over and over.
Today, I added a pre-roll clip to my plex server, even though the video is local, it still buffers. The short “buffering” black screen (Roku), really takes away from the experience. I hope some of the devs are looking this way, as having trailers, pre-roll clip, really makes the Plex experience similar to a movie theater if not for the buffering.
Devs, please make the buffering at the start only, since you already know the sequence that will transpire.
Any updates on this? It is still happening to me when viewed locally (web player), local Chromecast, and local Amazon Fire TV. Pre-loading would be great.
