Plex Movies and Shows suddenly buffering endlessly

General Discussions
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1

I’m a long time Plex user and a Plex Pass holder.

Generally, I have no problems with running Plex on my MacBook Pro with a 5TB Hard drive connected.

Yesterday, I watched a movie in the afternoon and had no problems watching via my Roku Premiere streaming device.

But then yesterday evening, I tried to pull up a show I’ve been watching and about 10 minutes into the show it starts buffering. I NEVER have buffering problems so this made me wonder if my internet had gone out.

No. Internet service for my computer and phone were working. I did a speed test and speed was really good (I have fiber optic internet and speeds are very high).

I thought maybe my Plex server had crashed on my dedicated computer. It hadn’t.

Still, I thought that maybe the computer was being overloaded by background processes so I shut all programs down (not that there are many programs to begin with) and I rebooted the computer and then restarted the Plex server app.

That did nothing. I still was getting buffering issues that never resolved. The show would take at least a minute to load and then when it did finally start playing, it would only play for 2-3 seconds before going right back to buffering.

I thought maybe it was a Roku thing so I restarted the device. That didn’t work. Plus, I tried watching the show on my computer via the Plex website. That just buffered….endlessly spinning and never actually playing the show.

I had not changed any settings on my Plex server and I hadn’t done anything different. I didn’t add shows so I was at a loss for why this all of a sudden, with no changes from me, changed how Plex seems to be operating.

Finally, I rebooted my internet and that seemed to fix the problem. I was able to watch one whole TV show and didn’t experience buffering issues.

However, today, I am experiencing the same issue. Endless buffering. I can’t load a show without it taking forever (it seems) and then when it finally gets to 100% the show runs for a couple of seconds max before going back to buffering. It seems endlessly stuck at 33%.

My question is: what is going on? Why did this start happening even though I’ve done literally NOTHING different. It’s as if Plex just has a life of its own and decided it wanted to start buffering to annoy the hell out of me.

Any guesses on what the issue is? I cannot be rebooting my modem every time I want to use Plex. I’ve literally gone years without any issues like that but now, for some reason, Plex just doesn’t work any more.

I looked around to see if someone else had this issue. I saw a thread from a few years ago but the thread was closed.

Would greatly appreciate if someone has had this issue and knows how to resolve it.

2

I am having the exact same issue only I use a Fire Cube instead of Roku. But the buffering just started and I have been playing around with troubleshooting but nothing seems to solve the problem. I’m hopong someone can help us both.

3

First step I’d check, is to see if you have a direct connection to your servers. If you can get the show to start, immediately go to your browser on any computer, and visit the dashboard. If you can screenshot this page, we can learn all kinds of things about the connection between you and the server. Feel free to censor the stuff I did (show name/poster, username of client if any, and username at bottom of the box)

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The important things we need are whether it is “local” or “remote” (next to the IP address), whether the video or audio is transcoding (the line that - for me - says “Direct Play”), and whether you are using a relay for any reason (not pictured, but the green lock will be a yellow !)

4

I have had buffering only when I play remotely. Never been an issue before until the last few updates. Infuse will play fine and even Jellyfin will play with no problem, but not Plex. I haven’t been able to figure out what has changed since I have not changed anything but apply updates on my phone and server.