Plex causes hair loss. Sound issues - cutting in and out?

I’m not one to complain about free software, but I’ve been living with this issue for months and have tried almost everything. If someone that really knows the in’s and out’s of plex and could help me with this issue, I’ll give you my 3rd born.

Here’s the issues, and how I temporarily resolve them.

  1. I use the roku platform on a TCL 55" 4k smart tv to connect to Plex via the Plex app/channel.
  2. Plex never has any issues starting, and loads my libraries just fine every time.
  3. I queue up a movie, and the movie loads no problem…no real delays or anything that I’ve noticed that would signal an issue.
  4. When the sound starts, it cuts in and out repeatedly…it’ll play for about a second, then goes off for a second, then play for a second, then goes off for a second…and it’ll continue until you cut off the movie.
  5. I come to my home server, start up task manager, end task on 3 plex related programs - plex media server, plex dlna service, and i think the plex updater or tuner service?
  6. I find the plex program with a quick search from the start menu, right click and run the program as administrator, go back and restart the movie and it works fine - regardless if it’s resuming an unfinished movie or starting a movie from scratch. I believe most files are .mkv files…which are really just shell files (if I understand them correctly). A lot use the AC3 encoding (which I thought was just another shell for audio files) and the base audio file is .mp3?

Restarting the plex media server is the only thing I’ve found that fixes the problem. I’ve never had to restart my server (which I maybe restart 1 time a week). I’ve never had to uninstall/reinstall the plex app on roku, or power off/on the tv. My TV (TCLRoku TV - 5.1.1.4433…-Plex) shows up in the devices menu along with the Plex Media Server, Plex Web (Chrome), iPadPro.

A few of the things I’ve tried:

  1. Updating plex to the latest version (multiple times - though i did just update to 1.10.1.4602 - it shows there is another update available after 1.10.1.4602, but when I install it, it shows an error )
  2. Uninstalling & reinstalling plex
  3. I’ve optimized versions of the movies for the TV, but it hasn’t helped.
  4. There’s a red exclamation point next to remote access in the settings…but I don’t think it’s relevant - I access everything from a wired ethernet connection on my home network.
  5. I’ve turned Direct Play and Direct Stream both on and off
  6. I just enabled the debug log so hopefully that might help. I’ll post the log if that offers add’l help.
  7. I’ve enabled IPv6 support and disabled secure connections. I’ve also enabled HTTP pipelining and webhooks, but nothing works.
  8. There’s no boost to the volume when audio is converted.
  9. I’ve set my transcoder quality settings to make my cpu hurt with no noticeable improvement (just incase it the audio issues were caused by plex trying to transcode the video while it was playing and not being able to keep up) Background transcoding for x264 is also set to Fast and 2 max.
  10. DLNA server is enabled, and timeline reporting is enabled.

I’ve read that other’s have had similar issues and it has to do w/ Plex transcoding the audio or a secure connection issue, but I’ve tried every setting I can think of, and still haven’t had any luck resolving the issue. The app works if I end task on the plex media server and restart the server, but I think it may have to do with closing the roku app and restarting it (without restarting the server), that changes some audio setting that breaks the audio?

Any help or ideas anyone has are greatly appreciated, because this is a nut I haven’t been able to crack!

That is a reasonable complaint as it makes your entire experience of Plex useless, I appreciate the offer for your 3rd born but I am still trying to pawn off my 1st and 2nd myself.

So lets start at square 0… when you play an item and go to now playing and hover over the item being played does it show transcoding?

Ha! There is the option to play various versions of the file, and you can select the one ‘Optimized for TV’ without any problem. I’ll have to double check if you’re talking about the now playing on the server.

Gotta be gremlins in the machine. Can’t get it to duplicate it now…maybe it was fixed with the last update?
Started a couple new videos from scratch, and they all seemed to be working fine. Came back to the server, and this is what I saw under status:

Hopefully, the last update fixed it, but who knows? If it happens again, I’ll try to add another status screenshot to try to figure out what’s going on.

Update: The issue did reappear, and the info from the now playing section on the server showed something different from when it was playing trouble free. The status shows it’s converting, but also has “throttled” showing as part of the status…something the trouble free show didn’t have. Here’s the screen shot:

It also has multiple transcoder services running which I though was weird. At first it was 3 transcoders…but now only 2 are showing…here’s the screen shot:

Is there no hope to have plex work as intended as my home media server? :frowning: :frowning: If I can just get past this freakin audio issue, I’d be singing plex’s praises!

DAGHLAGLAHLAHLGALHALHLHGALAHLLA BUMP DAGHALHGLAHLAHHALHGHALA

…well…the problem just won’t go away. Restarted the server, ran it as admin, and about 30 minutes later started a new movie, and the audio is still cutting in and out.

Came to the plex server on chrome, and looked at the status:

Here’s the file info:
Media
Video Resolution: SD
Bitrate: 2182 kbps
Width: 720 x 384
Aspect Ratio: 1.85
Container: AVI
Video Frame Rate: NTSC
Video Profile advanced simple
Part
Size: 1.9 GB
Container: AVI
Video Profile: advanced simple
Codec: MPEG4
Bit Depth: 8
Chroma Subsampling: 4:2:0
Frame Rate: 30fps
Height: 384
Profile: advanced simple
Ref Frame: 1
Width: 720
Codec: AC3
Channels: Stereo
Bitrate: 256 kbps
Audio Channel Layout: Stereo
Sampling Rate: 48000 Hz
Stream Identifier: 1
Codec: SRT
Language: English

So it has nothing to do with the throttling, and apparently, it has nothing to do with converting the audio source since the audio is direct streaming (at least I think that’s correct)? I’ll see what I can dig up in the log files, and try multiple files until I come across one that works to see if it’s a file formatting issue (but you’d think that’d be corrected when a file is ‘optimized’ for TV?). On to trying something else… sigh