I have an issue that I need some desperate help with. Videos are randomly buffering(lasts 5-7 minutes if you let it keep going). Normally you just stop the cast through the Plex app and start it up again. This mainly happens on Chromecast’s and sometimes a laptop. From what I can see the speed of the transcoding is above 1.0, mostly in the range of 3-6. Happens on my network and my partners network as well as 4G
Ive tried looking over the logs and there are no errors or issues that I can see, looks to be running as expected.
As you can see from the logs, the buffering started at :
Apr 15, 2020 22:02:59.210 and kept going until
Apr 15, 2020 22:06:36.704 where I told my partner to stop the cast and reconnect.
Does anyone have any ideas that I can follow ?buffing.log (964.8 KB)
I’ve observed this behavior too. It rarely happens on LAN, but over the internet it is frequent. Usually, I skip back 10-seconds. What I’ll see is it does it over and over again making a show unwatchable. I’ve learned to pull up the bandwidth monitor on the dashboard, pause the video, and wait for the buffer to fill (upload hits zero), and then I continue watching, and that helps.
I’ve looked for resource contention, but I can find any. Upload bandwidth from source is plenty, download bandwidth to target is plenty, less than 3% CPU load, less than 20% RAM load. I’ve also adjusted the upload stream (down to 720, then 480), but that doesn’t help. I don’t get it. Why would it work better on a LAN when the WAN isn’t being taxed?
You would think if it happens every few minutes and it happens for a second or 2 its just normally internet speed buffering. But this is so random where everything has buffered as normal and then it will just stop and buffer for minutes on end. All the logs say is buffering but the stats look fine. Does anyone have some ideas on how we can confirm what the issue could be ?
I’ve seen this issue a lot too with my chromecast. The workaround for going back 10 seconds has stopped working as it keeps the buffering display on while playing the video.
As well a recent change has been when I relaunch the video it starts from the bringing.
This maybe have to do with audio transcoding issues I’ve seen being posted for H.264. Not sure, ots only been happening for the past few weeks.
I’ve found that going back 10 seconds doesn’t work either.
I’ve changed the “Transcoder default throttle buffer” to be 3600 just to test that it buffers the whole show. However since then I’ve had 2 times where it “buffers”(this is on a the latest Chromecast).
I just did a complete reinstall of my PC and the issue seems to occur much less now. Could have been an update conflict as well that isn’t helping things.
I found that turning on “Disable video stream transcoding” / " Use hardware acceleration when available" / “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding” under > Settings > Transcoder, at times actually caused IOS devices to crash the Plex client,so I’ve disabled them. Ive changed my “Transcoder default throttle buffer” back to 120 and my “Background transcoding x264 preset” to “Fast”.
I have also found that manually specifying a public port under Settings > Remote Access so fair has caused the buffering issue to go away. This issue is when it buffers for roughly 5-7 mins for no apparent reason.
I will keep these settings and see if it improves over the next few days.
