Playback lagging and rewinding consistently while using Watch Together

[amarildo]

Server Version#: 1.24.4.5081 (Linux)
Player Version#: Mostly web player (but also LG smart TV 5.25.2 and PS5 latest)
Plex Pass subscriber

Hi!
I’m having issues when using the Watch Together feature with my friend that lives far away. If we don’t use the Watch Together option, and play the wanted content individually at the same time, playback happens smoothly without any stutter or rewinding.

But when we use the Watch Together option, playback initially takes a lot to buffer for my friend, then when it starts playing, it rewinds back every 2-5 seconds and gets stuck in a loop for some minutes till it moves forward some more seconds and the loop occurs again. If my friend leaves, it starts to play smoothly for me. But ironically, even if I’m the one who leaves, it starts to play smoothly and without interruptions for my friend, who’s watching remotely.

A month ago, the feature worked relatively flawlessly, even on my LG smart TV (webOS 3.4), which is my primary player. In the recent weeks, the feature hasn’t worked at all on my LG TV. Whenever I click on “Watch Together” for some content, it shows me the message “Unable to send invite. Please try again.” . Although I can see the newly created “Watch Together” room in the home screen, I can’t join it, it just shows “Could not join at this time” when I try. This whole process worked a month ago in my LG TV, as I mentioned earlier.

Because it didn’t work on my primary player, I was forced to use the feature on other players, a web browser (Edge Chromium) and on PlayStation 5. While the initial process of creating a Watch Together room worked there, and sometimes even the playback worked somewhat acceptably, recently I get constant loops (which I described above) that make content unwatchable.

I’ve tried a multitude of adjustments and setting changes. I’ve changed quality, player and transcoder settings.
Seeing some suggestions, I’ve even optimized the video files from 1080p to 720p so that my friend would remote stream the 720p file directly without transcoding. That actually fixed for a while but then the same issues started occuring again.

I collected some logs yesterday but unfortunately they’re verbose ones. I only realized now that I should’ve chosen normal debug logs.

I could have forgotten to mention some detail, so feel free to ask me.
Thanks in advance for your help!

[svenz]

Just curious - do you have multiple versions for the item? That seems to cause a lot of problems in my experience w/ watch together.

[amarildo]

Thanks for your reply! @JamesRa

Initially, I had only one version of the item. But, as I tried to explain above, I read suggestions about creating an optimized version of the item with Plex’ optimize tool, converting the item to the resolution that my friend is watching, would fix the problem. It did actually fix it, for a short time.

But as you say, it might be the cause of the problem. Although the problems I’ve had have encountered in both situations, I’ll try more with single version video files from now on.

[mkomarinski]

My siblings and I have a weekly movie night that we try to host using Watch Together. Pretty much every week one of us (usually me, who has the Plex server on my local network) has to stop playback and start non-WT playback. None of the movies I have are optimized, and they’re a mix of H.264 and H.265.

For me the symptoms are that one of the other viewers will get kicked out and have to rejoin, playback will skip back 10-15 seconds, or it’ll start buffering and get stuck at 33%.

Server CPU is at 20% during this point, and I have 1Gbps upload, so it’s unlikely this is a CPU or bandwidth issue.

[amarildo]

@mkomarinski That happened to me too sometimes. My WT buddies who watch with me can get stuck at some point of the buffering and even be unable to join once they left.

I’ve tried again a few times with different content and have in some rare occasions gotten slightly better results. That could be because of different video codecs that my content has, or hopefully the feature is being optimized by the devs. I can at least successfully create and join a WT session from my main player (LG TV), which wasn’t possible for a week ago or so.

I also doubt the issues could be related to CPU or bandwidth. I’ve tested different scenarios, like playing content (not in Watch Together) while a bigger number of remote and local users were also watching. I haven’t seen the CPU being throttled or my upload speed of 200Mbps being an obstacle.