After about 3 years with essentially no issues, all of a sudden, videos do not play smoothly. By that I mean they seem to constantly rebuffer. Every few seconds, a screen message with some percent of loading, presents itself.
I watch videos through two roku boxes, both exhibit the same issue. There have been no hardware changes in over a year (replaced a bad router) and there are no recent software changes of any sort. I don’t know if this is related, but I’m on Win7 and just did a windows update the day this started happening.
Please advise, I don’t know where to even begin. Thanks!
I’m not sure what you mean exactly. The pc running plex server is hardwired to the router, but of course the roku boxes are on wifi. And, to be clear, nothing has changed in my setup at all. It just stopped working after roughly 3 years.
Well, you have to start somewhere and (since nothing has changed) I’d still start with wifi - imo it’s the weakest link in the chain. I would get that Roku as close to the router as possible and try it there.
I’ve tinkered a bit and found out this: I tried lowering the streaming speed down to 720k from the plex roku channel. So far, plex seems to work with the lower speed. I would like to point out that ALL the other roku channels that I normally use, have worked fine without making any speed adjustment (netflix, youtube, and others).
Is it possible that plex is so much more sensitive to speed issues with wifi, compared to other channels?
Does the fact that the lower stream speed fixes the issue mean that the plex server cannot be the problem?
btw - I did a verbose logging and the transcoding speeds are all well above 1.
Same thing happened to me (not Roku). Everything was working fine using wifi then … buffering. Netflix, Hulu etc all worked fine but Plex buffered unless I dropped the birate.
I ended up buying powerline adaptors and that solved the problem.
That’s very helpful to know, thanks for sharing. I have one of the roku boxes less than 5 feet from the router, and since this is a cheapy TP Link router, perhaps it is the router. Not that it failed, just not a great router (never had this sort of issue with the Linksys I had before).
I’m not really familiar with a powerline adapter. Thought it was only for wired stuff, not wifi. I’ll have to do some homework
