Watch Together is an incredible feature that’s allowed me to connect with friends/family/colleagues for the last couple years in interesting and meaningful ways while we enjoy movies together.
With that said, I’ve noticed that the buffering/syncing component of it leaves a lot to be desired and frequently causes looping/pausing when a single problem client is struggling to stay in sync.
Here are all of my recommendations for fixing Watch Together’s buffering problem:
- Allow the host of a Watch Together party to set the per user maximum bandwidth. This would immediately solve the problem of someone with a 20Mbps WiFi connection accidentally buffering a 40Mbps video. It would be great if this setting were allowed to apply to every user in the Watch Together party and/or just to specific trouble participants.
- Allow the host of a Watch Together party to pick a specific version of the movie they want to share out. This would allow the host to ensure that nobody is playing back a 4K HDR copy of the movie if they have a specific 1080p SDR copy selected to ensure a large number of people can watch without any issues.
- Alter the syncing method of Watch Together parties such that only the person who is buffering repeatedly experiences their video skipping, pausing, and/or looping. Today, all participants suffer when one person has a bad connection, but it would be significantly more ideal if the person with poor device performance and/or connection speeds solely suffered. That person could then pause the movie and ask for help or just settle with the poor experience while the rest of the participants enjoy their film. Notifying the host of this would be the cherry on top for this.
- Display who in the watch party is buffering. This would allow the host of a watch party to message that participant and help them; maybe they need to move to a location with better WiFi, maybe they need to plug into Ethernet, or maybe they need to just update their remote transcode settings to cap out at something really low like 2Mbps.
- Require confirmation messages for skipping/pausing or altering playback of the film if there are more than 2 participants watching. A simple message that says something lke “Are you sure you want to pause for everyone?” would go a long way toward eliminating accidental pausing for large groups. There could then be 3 answers such as “Yes”, “No”, and “Yes, for 30-seconds” (to allow seeking). I regularly have seen people fast forward, pause, etc accidentally and spoil the experience for everyone.
- Allow the host to end a Watch Together party and kick everyone out of it. I’ve experienced multiple situations where we’ve had to start a different Watch Together session and people get confused by which one they should join since they’ll now see two or more sessions on their Plex app home screen. This would greatly simply that situation.
- Allow the host to block transcoding entirely for Watch Together sessions. Many Plex servers can handle transcoding for typical traffic, but a Watch Together session of 20 participants can bring most PMS to their knees. A quick and easy toggle for the host to disable Transcoding for a Watch Together session would be a great time saver instead of needing to go into settings and globally disable transcoding (beyond just Watch Together) which could potentially result in the host forgetting they disabled transcoding globally.
