Plex for Android TV Not Using Enough Bandwidth

[Szilassi]

Intro

Hi All, I am at my wit’s end with a problem in the Plex player for Android TV (Shield Pro 2019). Simply, the app is not using enough bandwidth to play smoothly and buffers about every 5 seconds. I have spent a fair amount of time trying to diagnose the problem, but couldn’t find anything.

The Setup:

My devices are split between two networks (My house and my family’s house ~50 miles away):

Network A (Fios 1000Mbps down / 1000Mbps up)

• Fios Quantum gateway
• TrueNAS 12 Server
• A few devices that all work as expected

Network B (Xfinity 200Mbps down / 15Mbps up)

• Netgear router and modem
• Android Tablet
• Windows Player
• Shield Pro 2019

The server has a Cat 6 connection directly to the router, but all the other devices are on 5 GHz Wi-Fi.

The Behavior:

All devices perform great on network A, and use a local connection.

On Network B, all devices except the Shield work great and can play the file. To illustrate this, I captured a bandwidth graph of playback the same 2 minutes of a file (48 Mbps average bitrate) on 3 devices on Network B:

Windows:

Android Tablet:

Shield Pro:

What makes this even more confounding is that maybe 1 day out of 10, the Shield does work as expected and can stream fine. However that is the exception and not the rule, so I am effectively unable to use the device.

Things I’ve Ruled Out

Transcoding: The content is direct playing on all devices.
Relay: I have disabled the option to use relays in the server.
Shield Network: This was a big one, the Sheild gets a full 200 Mbps to Netflix, speedtest.net and an SFTP connection directly to the machine running the Plex server. Also, it gets ~300 Mbps connectiong to the windows PC on the local network.
The 9.0 Update This has been happening since just BEFORE the 9.0 upgrade for Shield, and it still is happening on 9.0.1
App Corruption I have re-installed the app numerous times, cleared the app data, and cleared the cache.
System Corruption I factory reset the Shield after the 9.0 Update.

Finale

I’m just overall frustrated with this problem because I have spent a good bit of time trying to solve it, but am still unable to use my main playback device.

Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? Have you seen behavior like this before?

Thanks for reading, any help is welcome. Let me know if I left anything out or clarification is needed.

TL;DR The Plex player on my Shield Pro 2019 is refusing to use the bandwidth available to it, leading to constant buffering.

[Volts]

What’s the value of sysctl net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm on the TrueNAS box?

You might get better results if you set a couple tunables. The default TCP congestion control algorithm on FreeBSD is NewReno, which is so old it’s basically an anachronism. It works great on the LAN but less-great on the Internet. Newer alternatives like Cubic or HTCP are better for high bandwidth over the Internet.

There’s another newer algorithm named BBR that Google uses and Netflix brought to FreeBSD, but sadly it’s not in the TrueNAS build.

Try setting these in TrueNAS, System → Tunables, and rebooting. The first one loads the kernel module, the second one activates it.

Variable: cc_cubic_load (or cc_htcp_load)
Value: YES
Type: loader

Variable: net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm
Value: cubic (or htcp)
Type: sysctl

[Szilassi]

It was Reno, so I tried the other two algorithms. The tablet and PC both still worked fine but the Shield continued to only use ~12 Mbps.

[Volts]

Hrm! Dammit, I had high hopes. I haven’t had problems with a Shield, but moving away from Reno really helped a couple of my remote AppleTV users.

It would be interesting to set up a test server at your home temporarily on a different OS. If that made a difference, you could focus on the server. If it didn’t, you could focus on the Shield itself.

The fact that other clients are working well would SEEM to point to the Sheild, but then again, the fact that the Shield works well with other services …

[Szilassi]

Well, after banging my head against a wall for another week, I appear to have found a solution. I disabled developer options on my Shield and now it appears to be working.

The only setting I had on was setting the animation scales to .5, but turning it off seems to have fixed the low network usage.

If anyone has an idea why that would impact buffering or video playback I am curious to hear your thoughts.

Is anyone using .5 animation scale and NOT seeing this behavior?

[Volts]

Woah.