Really need so help. On of my shared users can’t seem to get their stream to stop buffering. He has a Fire tv Stick. I shared with 5-7 user and everyone has the same settings, yet he is the only one how is encountering this problem. He had an older fire. stick and thought that was the issue. But, he just bought the newest model and it was the same thing. He say he has no problem streaming Netflix and Hulu, just with Plex.
His DL speed is 200 Mbps. My upload speed is officially 25Mbps, but I consistently clock it at low 30s. The videos are 3Mbps at the most. We even tried uploading standard def and the same thing happen. Evenone else streams without problem
Does anyone have any suggestions on what steps he or I should take to fix this? Thanks so much,
I mean, just because everyone else’s is the same, doesn’t mean it’s actually the same. His Wifi connectivity on that firestick could be poor (that’s the first place I’d look). The routing packets take to get from you to him could be different than the routing to get from you to the other users. There’s a lot of things that can be very different even if all the equipment is the same.
Can you give us any more information? Where do you live, where does he live in relation to you, where are the other users who use it living, etc. Also, have you tried a direct file share between you and him? I would use something like resilio sync to share a large file (maybe a linux iso or some other piece of open source software) with them, and watch the bandwidth meter, see what it peaks at, see where it slows down to, see how volatile the fluctuation is…
If that checks out, and you can send to him relatively quickly and it’s not all over the place bandwidth wise, then I would say it is most likely his firesticks connection to his wifi… but there’s really no telling without more information…
You can use a program like an FTP (file transfer protocol, though a bit advanced for testing purposes) or something like “Resilio Sync” to share a file with him directly. You choose a file to share, give him a link, and he clicks the link and it downloads using the Resilio sync software. This creates a direct connection (ie. Without a middle man, like google cloud, or something) with him, and allows you to send a file to him at whatever full speed you can. You can monitor the file transfer in the program, and watch if the speed is relatively stable or if it fluctuates a lot… It will also show you how fast you can send directly to him.
That does make things difficult. Let me toy with my firestick for a few minutes, I’ll edit this post with something that could maybe be useful…
Edit: The only thing I could really say for him to do would be, on his firestick, grab the app ‘IP-INFO | Network Insights’ install it, open it up, wait for it to locate him in and his ISP information, and then navigate down to the “GO” button at the bottom. That will perform a speedtest for him with a local speedtest site (pretty sure it’s the speedtest.net service powered by Ookla which is a pretty standard test). It should tell him what his wifi is capable of, and then he needs to check that against what his ISP rated speeds are… But to be honest, that only gives us 1/2 the story (what his internet/wifi speeds are) it doesn’t give us what speeds you’re capable of sending and receiving to him are.
Even though others there are on the same ISP, with slower internet packages, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a bottleneck somewhere that doesn’t exist for them… He could have high ingress on his cable lines, he could have a lot of other Wifi’s in his area that are competing causing packetloss, any number of things could be wrong for him that makes his faster internet speeds slower than the others…
There is a free HTML5 Speedtest now available. You can install it very easily on your server so you can do a comparison between your own server, and publicly available ones. I’m hoping this can be integrated into Plex sometime!
