I’d like to think that I’ve gotten good at self diagnosing plex’s foibles over the last few years, but this one really has me stumped. Two days ago my media just stopped playing entirely, essentially endless buffering interspersed with a half second of progress every 30 seconds or so despite me making no changes or updates anywhere. Every once in awhile it’ll load fine for 3 or 4 minutes before reverting back to buffering. The really interesting bit is that it happens on every device and on every account of mine, while other people on my server seem unaffected. Here are all of the different ways I’ve tried diagnosing the issue:
note: all these attempts had no effect on the issue unless otherwise noted)
Server side (Version 1.25.8.5663 on TrueNAS Scale, located remotely):
- Ran a speedtest (result was more than 10x the average bitrate of the files I tested)
- Double checked remote access is working correctly
- Double checked port is correctly forwarded
- Tried switching ports to see if my isp was blocking it
- Called the isp to make sure they weren’t messing with anything (they weren’t)
- Restarted the plex server
- Restarted the whole machine
- Updated the whole machine
- Rolled plex back to a previous version (twice)
- Noted bandwidth speeds
note: these bandwidth charts were tested with multiple video files (further detail below), both the screenshots included in this post were for direct play on a 13mbps 8-bit h264 4K video
Server side (Version 1.25.2.5319 on WD shitbox backup NAS located on my local network):
- Ran a speedtest (result was more than 5x the average bitrate of the files I tested)
- Called the isp to make sure they weren’t messing with anything (they weren’t)
- Restarted the plex server
- Restarted the whole machine
- Noted bandwidth speeds
note: identical video file to the previous screeshot
Media-wise:
- Tried like ten different files of all different codecs, bitrates, and resolutions
- Tried intentionally transcoding. Interestingly this one actually had an effect; about 50% of the time the video would transcode and play back just fine. The other 50% of the time I’d have the same buffering issue. Obviously not ideal, I’d very much prefer to continue direct playing like I have been for the past three years
- Tried music. Music seems to be unaffected by this issue.
Playback devices (all versions are the newest ones):
- Plex for Mac Version 1.42.1.2926-415b0e14 tested remotely (TrueNAS Scale) and locally (WD)
- Plex for Windows Version 1.42.1.2926-415b0e41 tested remotely (TrueNAS Scale) and locally (WD)
- Plex for iPhone Version 8.0 tested remotely (TrueNAS Scale) and locally (WD) and also tested both remotely on cellular data
- Ran speedtests on all of them (result was more than 5x the average bitrate of the files I tested)
- Plex for Roku tested remotely (TrueNAS Scale) and locally (WD)
Accounts:
- Tested on my main account
- Had a friend (who is local to the TrueNAS Scale server) test on his account using the newest Plex for Windows version. Interestingly, he seemed to have no problems, and was able to direct play different several movies with no buffering (which I confirmed through tautulli). At this point I assumed it was a problem with my main account, and retried with my alt just to encounter the same issue.
Miscellaneous:
- Checked to see if anyone else was having this issue in the last few days on reddit and this forum (doesn’t seem to be happening to anyone else)
- Cried (didn’t help)
Nothing seems to point to a fault in a single server, network, account, device, app, or even isp. Help me please, I’m tearing my hair out here. Let me know if if there are any logs that would be useful to provide
