I have the same live TV problem, but I also have the constant buffering with recorded TV. It appears to be an issue with the Roku client app, because I can’t replicate the problem on wired or wireless PCs with the web player or mobile phones (iPhones).
My server setup is:
Version 1.11.3.4803
Core i7 6700
32G RAM
nVidia GTX 950 GPU
256G Samsung Evo SSD for the OS and temp files
Areca hardware RAID controller currently with 28TB of data for files
Gigabit wired network except for mobile devices that use 802.11ac,n,g,b
My clients:
I have a bunch of Roku Ultras in different rooms all hardwired with gigabit and some mobile phones and Windows laptops on wireless 802.11n. The Roku’s are all running the most current software, which is currently 8.0.1, build 4047-46.
I have loads of Blu-ray rips in H.264 MKVs (not re-encoded) that play upwards of 30Mbps 1080p with no problems on my wired devices, including the Rokus. I also have lots of re-encoded DVD rips in H.265 MKVs that play fine on all my clients. When streaming original quality live TV and original quality recorded TV that has not been converted (they’re unmolested mpeg2 TS recording files from a HDHomeRun Quatro recorded with Plex), the Roku’s all constantly buffer every 20-40 seconds. None of my other devices have any buffering issues, including my devices on WiFi. If I force the Roku’s to perform any kind of bit rate conversion, the Roku’s buffering problem completely goes away. For example, the closing Olympic ceremonies show 13Mbps 1080p as the original quality in the Plex clients and the Roku’s all constantly buffer, but if I force the quality to 12Mbps 1080p (the next highest quality preset), thereby forcing a conversion, they play fine. It would seem it’s not a matter of bitrate, it’s just forcing a bitrate conversion that fixes the buffering problem. I also did a test by manually converting an original recorded TV TS file to H.264/AAC with a higher bitrate than the original mpeg2 stream and the Rokus played it without issues.
I enabled verbose logging and my conversion speed never dropped below 5.8 when any clients were playing the original quality live TV or recordings. The conversion speed never dropped below 4.2 when I forced a bitrate conversion. According to the Plex support page, anything over 1.0 speed shouldn’t have problems. CPU utilization never exceeds about 5% for either original quality streams or forced conversions.
I’ve only been using Plex for about a month, so I don’t have any historical experience to share.
What if you turned off the GPU acceleration in plex and try it. If your cpu is low than it means 950 is probably doing the encoding. Wonder if there is an issue there. Just a thought for a troubleshooting step.
Thanks for the tip. I disabled the CUDA cores and it made my CPU utilization spike to 60-80%, but the playback issues are unchanged. After disabling CUDA, there didn’t seem to be any difference in playback issues or resource utilization between leaving hardware transcoding enabled or disabled. Also, the “speed” numbers dropped to around .9-1.6 when I disabled the CUDA cores, which is right on the edge of streaming without buffers. Why would my server, that has no other activity on it, and is no slouch from a hardware perspective, suddenly barely have enough oomph to stream a 13Mbps TV feed? Something’s out of whack.
Using Win10 Pro. I don’t have anything else active on my network or hitting the server and there’s no Plex scan or anything going, the machine is idling. It’s literally one Roku trying to play a live TV stream. Something that just caught my eye is while recording The Voice tonight, I was looking at the log files and the speed is bouncing between 0.8 and 1.9 and I reset everything back to optimal settings with CUDA active and HW acceleration on.
I just loaded up the live TV stream on my iPhone at original quality and it’s played flawlessly for 10 minutes. I even disabled WiFi on my iPhone and streamed original quality live TV to it via the cell network with no problems. My server CPU is hovering around 10-15% and GPU is also around 10-15% with three streams going. (1 stream is the live TV on Roku, 1 is PMS recording the same show, 1 is the same show live TV on my iPhone)
Everything seems to be pointing to a problem with the Roku app.
I experienced the same problem as the original poster when using a Roku Express+ (3910). When using a Roku Streaming Stick (3800) on the same TV in the same location (4 feet from WiFi Router) and the same server - it played flawlessly. In both cases, my 2 GHz Core2 Duo Mac mini server was not transcoding the H.264 video from the HDHomeRun Extend (set to highest quality) but direct streaming it and transcoding the audio from AC-3 to AAC. My conclusion was that the 2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g/n on the Express+ couldn’t keep up with the data rate, but the dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac on the Streaming Stick WAS able to do so. Note: my router is dual band a/b/g/n only, so it would have been using 802.11n on 5 GHz with the Streaming Stick and 802.11n on 2.4 GHz on the Express+.
A bit of a thread revival but good discussion. Been having/researching the same buffering problem using Roku streaming stick and Roku HD. Like others have found it doesn’t matter if video quality is changed to beyond poor; still buffers constantly. Running a Fire TV stick on same TV is fine, which would point to Roku hardware and/or software problem. However did find though this issue only occurs for me in Plex’s Live TV; it doesn’t occur when using the HDHR channel plugin on the Rokus so seems Plex’s Live TV software isn’t playing nice with Roku. So the channel plugin is a current workaround for me. Now if only the EPG not updating issue could get remedied, my Roku’s could be of use. Until then I will continue using the Fire TV sticks as it’s easier to see which channel is which and what’s on when the EPG image fails to update.
this is driving me crazy, i have this exact same issue!
hdhr quatro wired ethernet to plex media on a qnap nas with intel hd graphics with hw transcoding enabled. it transcodes mpeg2 to h264 and pauses every 30 seconds, completely unwatchable.
ok so i put a pms on a i7 quad core at 4ghz with amd hd7700 gpu and it still stutters every 10 seconds. there is either a problem with plex, or with my hdhr.
Well it should be easy enough to figure out if it’s the HDHR or not. Just try watching it via HDHomeRun software, Live Channels, VLC or anything other software.
If it streams perfectly then that pretty much clues you in that it’s the Plex Server or your specific setup that is causing the issues.
What client are you using to view TV via Plex that requires transcoding? If you install PMP on a PC and use this to view live tv does it still transcode or direct play? If direct playing are you still getting this stutter issues?
We need more info on the clients you are using and the logs from the client to see if anything stands out.
Hello cayars Carlo, I commented a few days ago I’m having this problem only with Roku on Plex Live TV. Playback is fine on FireTV clients, several different tablets, phones, laptops, etc., can have multiple HD streams going (had four simultaneous streams tonight), and fine with the HDHR app. But for some reason it buffers every few seconds on two different Roku models trying to play a single channel regardless of reducing video quality. So it’s not a hardware problem as well it doesn’t solely seem a Roku software problem as using the HDHR channel plugin the channels stream fine on Roku. Thanks for your support on this issue.
Roku’s can’t play back mpeg video while the tablets and computers can. Roku requires the server to have to transfer and deinterlace if needed while again the tablets and computers can deinterlace themselves.
Thus the server is having to do work for the Rokus and this can cause streaming issues depending on how powerful and how much other work the server is having to do.
You are not alone in seeing this. This is the downside of using Roku’s for mpeg/live tv.
@cayars said:
Roku’s can’t play back mpeg video while the tablets and computers can. Roku requires the server to have to transfer and deinterlace if needed while again the tablets and computers can deinterlace themselves.
Thus the server is having to do work for the Rokus and this can cause streaming issues depending on how powerful and how much other work the server is having to do.
You are not alone in seeing this. This is the downside of using Roku’s for mpeg/live tv.
In other words…Plex needs to STOP saying Roku’s are compatible with Plex?! NOT playing a major feature is a FAIL. And it should NOT be advertised as an available platform.
@cayars said:
Roku’s can’t play back mpeg video while the tablets and computers can. Roku requires the server to have to transfer and deinterlace if needed while again the tablets and computers can deinterlace themselves.
Thus the server is having to do work for the Rokus and this can cause streaming issues depending on how powerful and how much other work the server is having to do.
You are not alone in seeing this. This is the downside of using Roku’s for mpeg/live tv.
In other words…Plex needs to STOP saying Roku’s are compatible with Plex?! NOT playing a major feature is a FAIL. And it should NOT be advertised as an available platform.
I’ve got some minor gripes with the Roku client but it’s still my favorite.
Certain platforms by their very nature may have to transcode a variety of formats. The PS4 comes to mind as another heavily restricted platform if you’re someone that wants to be able to direct play everything under the sun. That’s not a Plex problem and that’s also not going to stop Plex from developing a client for the platform, and it’s a GOOD thing that they have worked around the inherent limitations of the hardware to let you enjoy your content there, you just need to run PMS on something made in the last 10 years that isn’t a low powered NAS to take advantage of that.
Not being able to direct play anything but MP4 on PS4 and no MPEG on Roku eventually made me decide to run my server separately from my NAS and I’ve been happy ever since. The implementation of live TV on the Roku is actually probably my favorite of the clients that I use, it has generally worked great over here after I knocked down the local playback quality to 8 MBps, still looks fantastic and YMMV.
@opoth said:
after I knocked down the local playback quality to 8 MBps, still looks fantastic and YMMV.
But that is the problem. ALL my media needs a decrease in quality for LiveTV to work? And I have tried running Plex on my i7 4770 CPU HTPC. The Roku’s I have (new 2018 streaming+ sticks 4K models) still won’t play Live TV on my mostly wired gigabyte LAN. I suppose there are only CERTAIN devices compatible. That is NOT how Plex is marketed. Nearly ubiquitous device availability with a 80’ asterisk where you see features aren’t equal. And to be honest, if a device is sold TODAY that handles 4K content, there is NO REASON LiveTV shouldn’t work. Clearly, the device has the power to handle the bitrate. But AGAIN, Plex will say is it them NOT Plex that doesn’t work.
@robwhitey said:
In other words…Plex needs to STOP saying Roku’s are compatible with Plex?! NOT playing a major feature is a FAIL. And it should NOT be advertised as an available platform.
@robwhitey said:
But that is the problem. ALL my media needs a decrease in quality for LiveTV to work? And I have tried running Plex on my i7 4770 CPU HTPC. The Roku’s I have (new 2018 streaming+ sticks 4K models) still won’t play Live TV on my mostly wired gigabyte LAN. I suppose there are only CERTAIN devices compatible. That is NOT how Plex is marketed. Nearly ubiquitous device availability with a 80’ asterisk where you see features aren’t equal. And to be honest, if a device is sold TODAY that handles 4K content, there is NO REASON LiveTV shouldn’t work. Clearly, the device has the power to handle the bitrate. But AGAIN, Plex will say is it them NOT Plex that doesn’t work.
Plex does work with the Roku, just not in an ideal fashion. Rokus only support a couple of video codecs so if the media isn’t in this format it must be transcoded or converted offline before using.
As funny as this sounds if you actually had 4K TV your Roku would probably be fine. 4K broadcasts will use H.265 codec for video and any of the newer Rokus will handle this fine. It’s current OTA and major stations on cable that use mpeg2 that cause the Roku grief since it’s a codec it doesn’t handle.
Even if it did support mpeg2 you would probably not like it for sports or action movies since anything 1080 is broadcast as interlaced video (1080i) and again the Roku’s don’t de-interlace.
Rokus were OKiish before DVR/Live TV functionality if you kept your media in compatible formats but with actual TV files/streams it’s a terrible client.
I’m not personally worried about the quality as much since I have older TV’s. HDHR to Plex to Roku looks really good to me with the quality dialed back. I might care at some point when I buy new a new TV. But what makes it frustrating to use is the failure to start, and it’s pretty consistently on one specific channel. That channel happens to be the one that I want to watch local morning new on, and is almost the only thing I ever use OTA for anyway. So it renders the whole solution nearly useless. I start the channel, and after a few seconds, it says that it crashed. I can try again, and it typically fails again. Then I try another channel and it typically works. Then, sometimes, if I go back to the original channel, it works, but more often it still fails. It hates that channel. And it’s not that HDHR isn’t tuning it or it’s a bad signal OTA. I can fire up the HDHR client on Windows, iOS and Android, and that same channel works consistently, no issues.
I switched to Roku a while back because it has the best support across all streaming providers. I had Fire TV previously, and it worked very well (was using the native HDHR app at the time), but I kept running into exceptions where one thing or another wouldn’t run on it, or Apple TV, or Android TV. But Roku, everything runs on, at least everything that I’ve been interested in. And Roku works great, with this Plex + HDHR exception.
I signed up for a free month of Plex Pass in hopes of using live TV with a couple of TCL Roku TVs at a remote site. The TVs stream other apps fine, and Plex Pass seems to work fine with my phone app, but lots of buffering with my Roku TV over the same connection as my phone. Tried dropping the quality which seemed to help some, but still too much buffering for me.
Hope there’s a fix for this in the works - I’d love to keep Plex Pass, but it’s not really useful to me without solid support for my Roku TVs.
I am still experiencing this issue on my XBox One with Live TV buffering. The server and the network speeds are both fine, but it still buffers. Playing it directly from the HD Homerun app works perfectly. I am hoping that there will be a fix for this. Looks like this issue has been going on for almost a year… I just got rid of my cable box to consolidate everything to PLEX, but this is super frustrating.
