Server Version#:1.18.5.2309
Player Version#:1.6.2.994-e05b79d6
I’m at the end of my rope with this.
My server is on a Windows 10 laptop in my living room, and I typically stream from the music library that lives on it to my laptop in my office upstairs. About half the time i have no issues whatsoever streaming on the Plex Windows app. The other half, the music just randomly stops. Sometimes fast forwarding to the next song will make it play for a bit, sometimes not, but generally when this starts happening it keeps happening for a long time…then sometimes resolves itself, and sometimes doesn’t.
I believe the app is streaming via my LAN, so i tried the web player which i believe would be streaming via the internet, right? And still often get the same problem.
The following actions occasionally seem to help (given the random nature of when this happens and what works, this is probably just coincidence):
rebooting the server
rebooting the router
sometimes there’s a new server version and updating fixes it
“repairing” the server usually cures the problem for at least a day, but last time i tried did not help at all
I have done a full remove and reinstall of the server. it helped for like a day.
There are no other apps running on the server so i doubt it’s a CPU issue. Streaming performance of other streaming apps on my LAN is not an issue–AND when plex works, it works great–so I can’t believe there’s a LAN bandwidth or connectivity issue between the server and router.
When i use the web player–where you can visually see the buffering indicator, unlike the desktop app–and it stops, it’s always because there’s no buffer left–but unlike other apps where this happens, it just stops buffering and sits there. That seems like some kind of clue. I tried to find a setting to increase the buffering and can’t.
Finally, the server is plugged into my stereo amp and i never have any issues playing directly from the server.
My main use case for Plex was streaming to my office, and it’s failing miserably at that. Please help.
An attempt to use a different approach when it comes to selecting and playing music. plexamp.com
At the moment the only desktop app which supports volume levelling and track segues.
Thanks again for your help Otto! I changed the settings and that didn’t help. I also downloaded plexamp.com–which looks very cool–but unfortunately it didn’t work either.
If your router is doing several bad things, I can imagine this can lead to your symptoms.
Look if you can change the portforwarding (which usually is only needed for remote access, but if the “second bad thing” comes into play, it is also important for local access).
Normally, it is created automatically when the server is started.
The problem is: some routers are disabling these automatically created portforwardings after a few hours/days.
Try changing that to a manually created portforwarding, which should last permanently.
Thought I’d follow up on this in case anyone else experiences the issue:
So i started poking around my router settings based on Otto’s advice but lacked the motivation/time to go through the port forwarding process. However, i did stumble on a router channel setting (for my netgear router, it’s in Advanced>Administration>Wireless Channel) and discovered that there were lots of other routers in my neighborhood, and there were a couple others besides mine using the channel mine was set to. So i changed to an empty channel (there were 8 and only 3-4 were actually being used by other routers), and my issues went away.
