I’m experiencing an issue where 2 of my clients are using Vizio TV’s and when they are streaming I see consistent bandwidth usage of ~90mb down to them regardless of the actual size or resolution of the file - this was reported in 2016 on a now closed thread but I’m still seeing the behavior and wondering if anyone on the dev team is aware of this?
How are you tracking bandwidth usage?
Do they use this much consistently, the whole time the video is playing?
Or do they do it in spurts?
Most clients will download as hard as they can, until their buffer is full.
My TV will download at over 250mb/s until the buffer is full. Then it is completely idle for a while, playing from the buffer. Then it downloads fast again for a moment.
This means that for low-bitrate content, it can download 30 seconds or more into the buffer, and the bandwidth usage graph is flat, and then a spike, and then flat.
I have MRTG tracking the outside interface of my firewall
Notice the two large blue spikes - this is outbound traffic and its fairly consistent (the one on the right is from today and I believe he was pausing the video). I have several other clients (Roku, FireTV, etc) and nothing else has this kind of behavior.
That’s impressive in a way. Hours at 60mb/s.
I experienced a Roku crash once: the image froze, audio kept playing, and the TV was downloading the same segment of video over and over again as fast as it could.
I assume you see the same thing in the Plex bandwidth statistics, and you’ve confirmed that this is correlated with playback from those TVs? I do see big steady downloads like that when a user is syncing/downloading.
I don’t have any good suggestions, just the basics. Logs from Plex and hopefully the TVs.
Oh, do you have a bandwidth limit configured on the server?
Funny thing is that Vizio TVs aren’t rare. I’m curious to follow along with this.
I do see the same data in Plex, and it’s been happening for years to me with one client, I recently added another friend who also uses a Vizio TV which is why I started thinking about it again.
No bandwidth limit configured on the server - I have gig up so the BW isn’t really an issue- I just know this isn’t right and would be willing to help someone debug it who can fix it.
Check this old thread-
Yeah I’m with you. That’s bizarre behavior.
Can I guess that you’ve got original/maximum quality and Direct playback enabled?
I’m not suggesting it as a “fix”, but I wonder if the behavior changes if you force transcoding. Perhaps just audio transcoding, or even remuxing.
I’m hoping a Plex dev pops up and asks for specific details. I think it would be worth monitoring PMS logs (and sharing here if you like) with Debug enabled to see if you see anything while this is happening.
I do have that enabled - but here’s the info I see about the stream that is going right now. It does appear to be transcoding
- PRODUCT Plex for Vizio
- PLAYER Plex for Vizio
- QUALITY 4 Mbps 720p (3.8 Mbps)
- STREAM Transcode (Throttled)
- CONTAINER Transcode (MKV MP4)
- VIDEO Transcode (H264 720p H264 720p)
- AUDIO Transcode (EAC3 Stereo AAC Stereo)
I read that other thread. Interesting that the OP reported it happens only for Direct playback for him … sorta rules that out as a factor.
And the example he gave was even lower bitrate than yours. Like he said - the TV could have downloaded and cached the entire file several times over.
I remember when Plex added support for Vizio, but it doesn’t seem like it’s on the support list at all now. I think that’s just an omission?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/204080173-which-smart-tv-models-are-supported/
It is listed here though:
https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/#modal-devices-smart-tv
https://support.plex.tv/articles/203810286-what-media-formats-are-supported
One way or another I think it’s going to come down to logging, so you can say “Look, the TV is requesting the same block of data over and over”, probably.
I was daydreaming about what might show up in a log file to explain high bandwidth usage, and I realized that HTTP streaming makes lots of partial requests. I searched and found this.
The suggestion - remuxing - makes a lot of sense. And it’s easy to do.
Can you try?
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