Plex App LG WebOS keeps buffering every second after fast-forward and resume

Hi

I uploading again my server logs where you see clearly the problem of buffering related to SRT transcoding on LG tv silents.

Plex Media Server—.log (235.9 KB)

What an absolute mess!

Constant charade of paying customers debugging and creating workarounds for endless problems. Can’t believe I’m paying for this “support”.

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Same issue with LG WebOS & plex server both updated to latest version. Resume videos always freezes after about 5 minutes of playing with subtitles enabled. If i wait it gives me error. If i pause video when it tries to buffer and change video settings and downgrade quality it plays without problems. If i bring original quality back it plays again for about 5-10 minutes then freezes again. Streaming locally.

Whelp, figured out why this bug has yet to be diagnosed (and may never be fixed). Looks like webOS is the least used Plex client out there, so it’s probably not worth the time to fix for them.

Shame since their TVs are constantly among the top options available

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EDIT: While downgrading to 1.16 may seem like an understandable workaround, it’s not. The latest releases have import security patches that fix exploits in the older versions of PMS. Even if webOS is not a widely used platform, the bug is bad enough that it is causing people to use vulnerable versions of the software, indicating that Plex really should be looking to patch this with a bit more urgency.

You are interpreting that wrong. LG TV’s use WebOS.

Oh, as in, there’s another LG Smart TV App besides webOS? I didn’t realize that. I assumed they were one and the same.

Fingers crossed any update or progress on this?

The current Plex app runs on 4K TV’s running WebOS 2.0+. If you have a non-4K
LG WebOS TV or WebOS 1.x you’ll see the old Smart TV app.

That makes a lot more sense. I had a hard time believing so few people use webOS. All the more reason to get the bug fixed :grinning:

Hi

I uploaded server log regarding the buffering issue and SRT subtitles trans-coding on previous post .

What is not clear to me is that I tried different windows PC server installations , test on WebOs v4,1 device, downgraded Plex server to version 1.16 and the issue of buffering randomly still exist.

I read a port claims that Plex server version 1.16 is a workaround , did not work for me :slight_smile:

Thanks

I am uploading a new server logs including the issue of buffering on a LG WebOs v4.1 device.
I also checked that Plex Server version 1.16 has the same issues.

Thanks
logs.zip (73.8 KB)

@home000000_gmail_com I think there may be two separate issues here that seem very similar, but may have different underlying causes. I’m not fully sure, only the Plex team can give more insight, but seems they are really struggling to understand what is going on.

  1. For webOS 2 and 3 (you do not belong in this group), buffering is being caused for any transcoding playback when doing resume/seek. People have mentioned that rolling back to PMS 1.16 fixes the issue, but with all the security patches found in 1.19, this solution is not at all recommended.

  2. It seems, for webOS 4 (you belong in this group), buffering is caused by transcoding specific to subtitles. Others have mentioned the same behavior as group 1, but I am not in this bucket, so I cannot verify if they are similar. It is not clear if rolling back to PMS 1.16 can fix the issue – you are indicating that it cannot, though I feel like others in the thread have mentioned that it could.

@anon18523487 is the one helping us in this thread, so he can maybe give some insight into the different bugs for webOS 2/3 and webOS 4 work respectfully, as well as if there is any workaround for the issues on webOS 4 right now. The devs have been working on it for 5 months now, so they have probably done a lot of testing on their end and can help.

You can also try lowering the playback quality when buffering begins. It will work for a bit, then start the stuttering again. Try lowering it once more after that. On webOS 2 and 3, this has been my current workaround. It is not a good way to playback media at all, but it does sort of work.

Example: I start something at 8mbps, then pause. When I come back, I resume at 8mbps, which causes stuttering. I lower to 4mbps, then can watch like 10 minutes fine before stuttering resumes. At this point, I drop quality to 3mbps, and it typically “fixes” the issue for the rest of playback, though if it occurs again, I will drop to 2mbps.

I have both LG TV running both WebOs 4.1 and WebOS 3.5 the symptoms of buffering when selecting SRT subtitles are the same.

buffering few second after starting to play or doing fast forward.

I opened a new topic for LG WebOS v4.1 buffering issue.

Right, webOS 3.5 will also have the issue when playing with subtitles because it still is transcoding, but it should also be occurring for any transcode, regardless of subtitles. Did rolling back to 1.16 fix the issue for the webOS 3.5 TV?

regarding SRT subtitles on WebOS it is not clear why transcodeing is needed since the TV supports direct play including subtitles streaming.

Cmon! since it’s clearly working in version 1.16.x.x why don’t the team look at what was changed??? Its really annoying not to be able to fast forward / pause a movie knowing that after a resume it will stutter every second if you have subtitles on.

I installed Xplay on my OLED 55C9PLA and have no issues, streaming with the Plex app is only causing issues

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This issue sounds quite similar to what I had with iOS client where video virtually stops or getting a very long delay after one or two clicks of forward seeking and it only happens with “Direct Streaming” with soft subtitles turned on.

https://forums.plex.tv/t/ios-app-seeking-broken-when-smi-or-srt-subtitle-turned-on/

The only solution I found until now is to make it “Direct Play” by turning off subtitles or switch to experimental player avoids “Direct Streaming” which is required for side-loading soft subtitles for the default player. The new player recently came out of beta and became an official feature, but it still fails with the very same seeking issue when it has to go down with “Direct Streaming”, for example, in the case of side-loading SMI subtitles which is somehow not supported by the new player (SRT/ASS works fine).

One thing I noted at the time was that whenever a seek request triggered by the client, the server always started transcoding (merely for merging soft subtitles into HLS streams, not for full video transcoding) from the beginning, wiping out any on-going/already processed segments. It seemingly made any seeking attempts far from the beginning of the stream very inefficient as play was progressing and also added up much more burden when transcoding was interrupted by another seeking request.

A funny thing was that if I made it full video transcoding instead of subtitle-only transcoding, the problem went away and everything seemed to work fine again, except degraded video quality of course…

Not sure if this issue is still relevant nor has something to do with WebOS whatsoever, just wanted to chime in as someone used to try hard on LG device, but finally had to give up due to some never fixed issues:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/fix-settings-forgetting-bug-on-lg-smart-tv-with-webos/
https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-is-unable-to-start-due-to-an-error/

my belief is that the Web os app is the problem
i have downgraded the plex server to 1.16, still the same problems, no subs then also no problems.
In addition, I run the plex app on a firestick without any problem, android TV, no problem.

Hi @anon18523487 any solutions here ? Any updates on this issue ? This is really rendering the app to be unusable.

Any ETA on the bug fixes ?

Thanks!

No solution yet. To provide some more info. There was a bump in FFMPEG in the problem PMS version. There were changes upstream from FFMPEG as well as Plex’s own tweaks. It’s taking time to go through and identify what might have caused this issue. The devs are looking, but this is not an easy thing to track down.

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