To be honest, it sounds like an issue with your setup. Have you tried running a windows version of the server, rather than using a VM to do it? Where is the media stored relative to the VM and the Windows pc?
The media is on the vm setup. Windows can only see it via smb. The vm is running the pms. To me it sounds like an issue coming from the nwtwork. Wifi connections don’t give me higher than 70mbps on the tv while the router is less than a meter away from the tv. Wired connection reaches 92mbps. And it buffers with both. I can try the windows pms, hopefully it will see the smb content
Update. Installed pms on windows. It is getting the content via smb from the linux on the vm. The pms on linux is stopped. Plex on lg tv still buffers. That with a wired connection. And before anybody asks, yes I made sure there is no lock on the pms of win, so it is not the secure connections.
Copy a movie to a drive that’s local to the windows PC and try again. Do you have a big enough USB drive to copy a movie on and play it locally on the TV?
I definitely don’t have a usb stick of that size. Tomorrow I can try with the movie locally stored in windows.
I ended up jumping ship for Emby. The Emby app works wayyy better. I highly recommend.
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All local content is constantly buffering for me using direct play.
LG OLED55B7V-Z webOS 04.70.95
Plex for LG 3.74.0
webOS 3.7.0
802.11ac WiFi to BT Home Hub
PMS server is “Nearby”, secure connections disabled.
Version 1.13.9.5456
Gigabit Ethernet connection to BT Home Hub 1500 MTU
I am having issues as well. I have the same setup as pimpinonline. I can’t seem to play a 4k movie without buffering. Every 20-30s there is a quick buffer. I have checked CPU stats and I also turned on hardware acceleration. I have 150/150 internet at home and the stream is using around 100mbps at least that is what it says in my PlexPy app. I will try disabling the secure connections, but are there any other updates?
Thanks
Since the last update I can not use plex on my tv lg webos, please can return to the previous update was perfect I do not know why to touch it, nobody complained.
Thank you
I tried unsecure connections. I am on a 5g network that is only used by my TV. I has an ASUS triband router with wireless speeds of 130mbps/150mbps from speed tests. Is this just simply a Plex App issue. My CPU usage is less than 30% when streaming with hardware acceleration is enabled.
When playing something through the LG app can you check that nothing is being transcoded by the server?
While playing a video go to your server’s webpage, click the activity button in the top right (assuming you’re running a recent plex server it’ll be lit up with a number next to it) and select ‘Now playing’. That should open a new page show the file being played. If you mouse over the playing file picture, it’ll say whether it’s direct playing or being converted. If it’s the latter it’ll also say what’s being converted. Can you make a note of that or get a screenshot?
I just tried two different movies. Both played as direct play with very little buffering issues. So far it has buffered twice in 20 minutes for a very short period.
OK So I am not going crazy. 2 LG smart TVs and same problem. Every other machine including 4 year old crap droid boxes play smoothly without issues. But both LG tv sets buffer and are annoying. I pay for plex pass but I am getting ready to jump ship now that emby has an LG app. Is there a way to downgrade the LG plex app to the last version that worked fine? It’s only since updates I have had issues.
Yep I’ve got the same issue with my LG. It was working fine a couple of weeks ago but now it is unuseable due to buffering every few seconds. No issue playing media via Plex apps on iPhone/IPad/Apple TV, but LG Plex app is unuseable.
I’d try XPlay instead but currently the only available version is a broken beta.
I’ve had to resort to copying media onto a USB stick.
Yeah I paid for XPlay to see but it has issues also usually. Though it doesn’t seem as bad as the plex app. Hopefully they can simply figure out what changed since it worked before flawlessly before some of the updates.
So I got frustrated enough to take some time with this issue and think I may have a solution. Hopefully my positive results will yield some benefits for the other users here.
So a little background on my setup - I am running plex server on a cloud compute instance hosted on my digitalocean.com account. I am using an ubuntu server 16x instance and the media is all stored on google drive. I have the google drive mounted as a local folder using rcache/rsync and unionfs.
Playback has been perfect on every device except the LG TVs. This was never a problem before the updates to the LG app. So I got playing around with settings during playback and so far I have been playing Ant Man and The Wasp which is a 1080p file for my test (since it didn’t seem to matter what file size or bitrate for this problem to occur I used an average file)
So when playback started and I had direct play set as my preference, I was getting the buffering problem every couple minutes like most people here. But So far since making this change I have been playing this movie while I type this without one buffer, where normally I would have gotten frustrated and stopped playing the title by now.
Here is what I did:
When playback starts, go to the player settings to the right of the play/pause/skip buttons. Scroll down to quality. Take note of what it says beside play original quality option. In my example, it says 4.9 Mbps, 1080p HD. So now I look down the list of quality options and I select Convert to any quality with a higher Mpbs than the original. So I have so far tried with 1080p 20 Mbps, 12 Mpbs, 10 Mbps and right now as I type this I have it on Convert to 1080p HD 8 Mbps. So far not one single buffer in almost 30 minutes.
On the server side, it says the LG TV is direct playing the media file.
Hope this helps!
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Like many, I have noticed the constant buffering of 4k movies. This is normally not an issue as our setup includes a newer intel i7 and a GTX980. Even when I turn off everything on the rig it still has issues.
I have had issues with buffering when rewinding and fast forwarding. When we press those buttons the video skips, buffers, skips, buffers, and repeats until we press back. Then when we go back into the video it restarts where we tried to start skipping. It has been driving us up the wall as we like to skip intro music to tv shows. This was not an issue more than a week ago.
If we could revert back to the old UI where there weren’t issues or just fix these issues that’d be great.
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Guys I solved my problem. But it was coming from my setup, not related to PLEX eventually.
I am writing it down for future reference if somebody is that crazy to follow what I have done and then face the same issue.
A few words on my setup. I have a windows 10 desktop and in it I am running vmware with linux. All of my content is stored in ZFS file system and needs linux to be read and broadcasted via smb share to the rest of the network.
Now here’s the catch. VMware gives you 2 options to set the virtual network interface. One is the bridged mode, where the vm linux gets its own IP and then the content can be seen via smb share by other devices in the network, such as my gaming PC, also running windows 10. The other mode is NAT, where the vm linux gets the same IP as its host desktop. However, with that config, my gaming pc cannot see the smb share anymore. So I kept it at bridged mode.
When I originally run the PMS, it was on the vm linux, with bridged mode. When trying to copy files from the smb share to the host windows, I had speeds like 100MB/s. But when trying to access the smb share by other devices in the network, like my LG tv or LePotato (also capable of playing 4k content), the buffering was there every 10 sec.
I tried to run the PMS on windows, keeping the bridged network with the vm linux and the results were exactly the same with all devices.
Solution: Run PMS on windows with NAT network mode for the vm linux.
No buffering whatsoever! 4k HDR content available and playing non-stop. Even at 80mb/s bitrate movies.
This proved that windows was messing up with the virtual network intefaces when sharing the content with non-windows devices.
So, finally I will be able to get rid of windows and run linux natively on that pc, with no issues and no buffering.
P.S. Secure connection was disabled even before I performed the above solution. I don’t know if it works with secure connection enabled.
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The app is buffering when I direct play 4k content
@Plex any update on this? I purchased the LG C8 recently to replace a Samsung SmartTV and was disheartened to find not only the Plex interface for WebOS to be far worse, but also to run into the buffering issues described in this thread. I’m unable to watch anything without buffering - even at 720p. I didn’t have any issues with my Samsung, and I’m able to stream Netflix and Amazon 4K UHD without issue.
Hi All,
I believe the problem to be related to the latest server version and the one before this one:
Version 1.14.0.5470
If you roll back 2 versions the buffering issues go away on the following devices:
- Latest LG 4K TV running WebOS (55")
- Samsung 2015 Model Smart TV (65")
- Via the Web Browser on the server itself (Windows 10)
- Sony PS4
I have never been able to get Plex to run right on my 72" Sony 4K TV in the media room, I have to do via the PS4 as the Opera based player just sucks big time
This is a major problem on this version of server and the team need to fix it ASAP, I spent countless hours diagnosing the fault thinking it was the Network or the TV itself, when I realized that if I run another media center the problem does not exist on that media center.
The team really need to look into this and find out what has changed in the last two updates that brought this problem on. NOT Cool when you pay for a Plex pass and the service does not want to work right.
Cheers,
David,
