So, I’ve had this issue for a while and I’m finally trying to do something about it. Hope the forum can help. As the title says, I get this error only sometimes when playing videos with Plex. This is the message that appears on my Roku Ultra, and also my sister’s Roku Express: “Playback has stopped due to multiple playback errors. Please check your connection and try again”. On the web player there is no such error message, but I can confirm that the same video will not play there either. On the web player there is just a spinning status wheel type thing. I haven’t bothered until now to seek out the issue as a restart of the Plex Media Server will always fix the issue. I’m tired of having to do that though, and I don’t want my users having to text me whenever it happens to them. I had it happen just now with a few videos and I’ve downloaded the logs and uploaded them here. If anyone out there has experience with this issue and can see what the problem may be from the log files, I’d greatly appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance, and please, if there is any other useful info I can provide, let me know! Cheers!
@ChuckPa That’s good to know, but I’m not sure it’s the problem. I tested a few videos when this was happening, and some played and some didn’t. The ones that didn’t play failed every time and the others played fine every time. If it’s the network cutting out it’d have to be a crazy coincidence that it cuts out every time just for the videos that have failed previously. Also restarting the server fixes the problem immediately every time. I have a wired connection to the server BTW. Any other ideas?
I haven’t had the problem with my Roku but several i share my library with do. Looks like i’m going to have to go back to a previous version of Plex to fix.
I have recently had this similar playback issue on all of my plex devices from the Ubuntu Plex server(s) to Roku Plex App. I do not see bandwidth issue but do see spikes of upward to 80Mbps. I also see CPU on server max out (8 core). When I play same movie on Amazon Firestick, Local PC, or phone app, I do not see issue with streaming. This (to me suggests transcoding issue and perhaps Roku has made a change to which CODECS they support. Perhaps Plex App on Roku has made a change?
I ended up so frustrated by this issue that I just completely wiped my machine, reinstalled Ubuntu 16.04 and completely rebuilt my server. I’m running a fresh install of Plex that’s updated to the newest version and thankfully all that seems to have eliminated the problem. Not a fun solution, but it’s the only solution I found. There are so many other users who have had this issue, you can Google and read forum posts for days without finding any useful info. Too bad that Plex pass we paid for includes zero actual support. Now at least I have a working server again. I’m just bummed I lost all my watched status and collections because I was afraid to backup anything in case it carried this problem over. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe this to be a Roku problem. Whenever I saw this on my Roku, I could go to the web app on my server PC and try to play the same file, and it wouldn’t load. All of my files are converted to mp4 h264/aac audio so it’s not compatibility. There would just be that spinning circle in the middle of the screen. Good luck to anyone with this issue. It’s a bi@#h.
I took your advice and rebuilt 3 Plex Servers with Ubuntu 16. I had built them previously with Ubuntu 18 which worked great and suddenly went to #%^!.. With the rebuilds, I have distributed the load of movies among the different servers out of paranoia. It is now working with the key words ‘Ubuntu 16’. This issue has been driving me nuts but hopefully is now resolved. Good Luck to all.
Yep, now that everything is working I’m terrified to ever update again, which sucks. It’d be cool if this server software was designed in a way that you don’t have to chose between new features and performance updates vs. completely breaking your $hit.
On a Windows 10 machine. Roku does not play and Plex (web) does not play if the file has an MP4, codec but plays fine if it’ an H264. They all play fine on the stand-alone Plex app. Any ideas how to fix this?
