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.
