I have two plex servers, one locally, and one located a 400 miles away. I have plenty of bandwidth at both places to stream high bitrate content. The issue I run into is that on my ATV 4K and Nvidia shield plex clients, sometimes, playback is jerky or it’ll just say ‘buffering’. Other times its perfect. Its not a setting issue as I’ve taken all the appropriate steps to Direct stream my content. The issue, I think, is random network congestion.
The only player that currently continues to support setting a buffer of up to 500 megabytes is the Plex Media Player on Windows 10. It has been replaced by Plex HTPC, but playback on Plex Media Player is rock solid. The buffer helps with all of the network congestion issues.
So given that, I’m requesting that the devs please update the other streaming players with the ability to set a streaming buffer. Thank you!
Htpc can direct play almost anything. If pms has to transcode, you’ll likely run into the same issue. That buffer isn’t used the same when transcoding. Other clients are the same. They do have a large buffer but only when direct playing.
Hello, thank you for responding! So, I’ve specifically set all the settings so that I’m only ever direct playing all of my content. I have 3 clients: Plex Media Player on my Windows 10 client, a Nvidia Shield and a Apple TV 4K. I know the Apple TV has to transcode anything that’s dolby trueHD or atmos, so I select an alternate soundtrack that it can convert to PCM. The Shield can play anything natively without transcoding.
In any case, everything that I’ve tried to stream from my remote plex server, is set to being played back without the need for transcoding. It’s only that playback either works perfectly, or stutters, or fails entirely on the Apple TV client, the Nvidia Shield client. It never fails on the Plex Media Center client given that I’m able to, and have set that buffer to 500 Mb. It takes a few moments to get started, but once it does, its rock solid, as if I’m streaming from my own LAN.
Not to refute you, but on the Nvidia Shield and Apple TV 4K clients, whenever playback does successfully work form my remote server, every time I try to jump 30 seconds, it has take a while to buffer before it’ll get there. Not so with my Plex Media Player client. Since I have set the buffer to the maximum, whenever I skip forward, playback is instant. That’s how I have been able to confirm in my own layman way, that the buffer setting on Plex Media Player works perfectly.
I’d be very happy if you would revisit this issue, or if there’s something I can clarify to justify the need for the buffer option on the other streaming devices I frequently use. Thank you!
Keep in mind that devices like the shield and Apple TV don’t use storage for caching video like programs on a pc can. It’s just how the os work.
To be clear, these apps have never had the ability to set the cache amount. I believe these are set dynamically based on the memory available to the app. Try closing out any other apps running before using plex and see if that helps.
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Ah I see. One final question: would it be possible to add the buffering options to the PLEX HTPC client that’s available on windows, much like how it exists on Plex Media Player? Then I could really just use my PC for remote streaming of 4K and 1080p content on my remote server without having to fool with the streaming players like the shield or atv. Thank you!
There currently is no UI to set the size of the streaming buffer but you can do it in the mpv.conf file. A setting of demuxer-max-bytes=500000000 will set it to use a 500MB buffer.
What about other platforms? Will a UI option be added?
It’s a global issue with plex and a lot of users experience it as a choke point without ever identifying it, sometimes it can even be a rare occurrence. I actually managed to reproduce the phenomenon purely by adding enough latency to traffic, on the same binded LAN adapter within a virtual machine (loopback) it’s even possible to replicate it using purely just localhost. Essentially what’s happening sometimes is the server says “ping” with the data and whilst the client is reaching the end of their available buffer to playback the server doesn’t receive the “pong” back in a timely fashion for the next segment to be sent. I understand the need to restrict this behaviour for such a wide platform base (some with VERY limited RAM), but it is 2024 and it’s a little odd for video playback to have the potential to be so spotty without any real configuration to fix it on a platform that isn’t ONLY windows and by using an override that isn’t the most straightforward for most end-users
