Had a Roku stick on my 1080 TV. A few months ago it started stuttering occasionally on any movie I played. No worries, my other Roku stick and my Roku 3 still worked on my other 1080 TVs.
Replaced one 1080 TV and streaming stick with a Roku 4 and Vizio P65-C1 4k TV and no 1080p movie I play on it will play smoothly. For the most part I have h264 AAC MP4s. But even an old SD rip buffers happily and won’t play.
I have the app settings all set to play using the original encoding. By default the app on the Roku 4 was set to trying to play them at 14 or 20 Mbps 4K, which would have caused transcoding.
I have never gotten Plex to work on either the PS3 or PS4 apps with my 1080P TV. Will not play anything. Usually with the error “the video did not start playing in time”. I’m making a separate post for that issue, but have attached the logs anyway.
I have attached log files where I tried one movie on 4 different devices. I enabled debug logging, stopped and restarted PMS to get a fresh log file, played the movie and let it buffer a while…
Roku 4
PS3
PS4
Roku Streaming Stick (works!)
I also have a Roku 3 (wireless) that works just fine, but I didn’t log that.
The file I played has its information in theMovie.xml.txt.
My network is running gigabit ethernet.
I installed the Speed Test app on the roku.
Results were between 13.5 Mbps and 18 Mbps.
It is a lot slower than I expected given that I am on a 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) down plan, and running Ookla’s speedtest on my PC gives 93 Mbps. speedtest.net/my-result/5572676271
Hopefully someone can see something in the logs that makes sense to them. The only thing that jumped out at me on the Roku 4 log is the number of calls to the photo transcoder. Seems odd.
It looks like the stick is requesting the video to be transcoded and the Roku 4 is Direct Playing it. Without seeing the Roku logs, I am assuming the network is not fast enough to keep up with the Direct Playback (even though it should be). External speed shouldn’t really matter, unless you are streaming from a remote server. There is a possibility that your Roku has to use the external IP due to DNS rebinding and that may cause performance issues. It looks like that way as you masked the IP’s coming into the server (999.999.999.x). We do have an update coming that should fix this issue, but in the mean time, you may try disabling security in the PMS temporarily and try again. If this fixes it, then you may be able to fix the DNS rebinding issue by following the info outlined here - https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/206225077-How-to-Use-Secure-Server-Connections
I just turned on remote logging and am recreating the issue as I type this. Once this queues up I will switch over and try out the security check.
I manually masked the IP address to 999.999.999.* before attaching the logs. It was my internal IP address - which isn’t anything other than 192.168.1.*. Typical for a home network.
Turning off secure connections has nearly fixed the issue for me. I still get some buffering after a few minutes when the bitrate is 6 Mbps or more…but I suspect there may be a problem with my network or my server.
I can play anything that is encoded under 6 Mbps with minor buffering, even an HEVC h.265 encoded movie that didn’t buffer until the 6 minute mark.
Do you have a link to the DNS rebinding issue so that I can watch that and try turning security back on once it has been resolved?
Oh, and I turned on the Online Plex for Roku Launcher and have a log that I was going to attach, but it seems to contain a few sensitive pieces of data so I am going to hold off unless you need it.
@AnttMedia good to hear, but 6mbps still seems quite low with security turned off. I took a look at the online logs and it looks like your Roku is connecting through the “internal” ip address. I can’t say for sure that it wasn’t when security was turned on though without looking at the Roku logs during that timeframe. Feel free to PM me the logs to keep the information private. It’s also worth checking to make sure of a few things.
Server is hardwired
Roku is hardwired (verify in the network settings. It’s possible the Roku may choose to use the wireless connection if the ethernet connection failed at any point)
Verify the Roku and Server are on the same subnet, otherwise they will have to communicate through the router that may cause performance issues.
The problem was an issue with my network adapter configuration. I found this article and now I’m right as rain. Not a single ounce of buffering - even on high bitrate movies.
Large Send Offload is a technique of improving network performance while at the same time reducing CPU overhead. Apparently it does not work very well, so it was suggested to disable it. If you would like to know about LSO, check this MSDN article from 2001.
LSO is an option located in a Device Manager under your network adapter, so this solution requires Administrator Privileges.
Follow these steps:
Open Start Menu, right-click on Computer and select Properties
Under Control Panel Home located on the left side of the window click on Device Manager
You will get a list of all devices on your machine. Expand Network Adapters.
Find your Network Card and double-click on it.
Select Advanced tab. You will get a list filled with different options.
Select Large Send Offload V2 (IPv4) and set the value to Disabled
Do the same for Large Send Offload V2 (IPv6) if it is available
Click OK
I think that this information may be able to help other people who are running PMS on a Windows 7 (maybe other versions) box.
I’m so happy - my media now works on every device in my house - even on my PS4 and PS3 where it has NEVER once worked!!!
Thank you so much. Plex really should mention this. After nearly binning it off because my massively overpowered system couldn’t play a movie from one box to the one sitting next to it, this one thing actually fixed it.
Thank you so much. Has helped the buffering problem on my Ubuntu Server 18.04.1 and has seemed to have stopped the random crashes on everyone’s Roku. Just added the following lines to /etc/network/interfaces and restarted the network service. (TSO is the LSO equivalent in Linux.)
Worked for me as well! I thought at first it was the fact all of my movie files were .mkv, but even after transcoding a few via Handbrake, I still could not go a few seconds before buffering. My Roku was hardwired into the network, and my laptop could stream via Plex web flawlessly over wifi, so I knew something was not right. Disabled the LSO and everything worked. So happy now.
Another thank you from me. I’m running Plex on a Windows 10 machine running in VMware and disabling the large send offload setting in Windows was the solution in that setup as well.
I am having this same issue on my Roku over wifi (can’t hardline the stick), but the issue sounds the same. I’m not very network savy and I’m trying to figure out how to implement this solution, but it sounds like most people are running the Plex server on a Windows machine (which is what the instructions were listed for). Does anyone have any idea how I would implement this to test when I’m running the Plex server on a QNAP server? I have it hardlined into the router with my PC and manage the application through the web login to my QNAP on my PC.
Just for anyone else in the same position as me on Windows 10 pro using a wireless adapter: the settings under the advanced tab are named slightly differently… The properties you want are “ARP offload for WoWLAN” and “NS offload for WoWLAN”. Disable those.
