@sixones, I’m not having this problem on my Shield, but my sister is having it on her Fire TV. Both are on the same network with the same 7.0.4 version of the client.
I had her start it fresh and demonstrate it and pulled the logs for you. It happened in probably less than a minute after starting so I grabbed the log immediately. I’m attaching them along with the XML of the file and a 5 minute sample of the file itself that we used to test.
Setup-wise, both the Shield and the FireTV are on the same network and plugged directly via HDMI into TVs with no audio receivers. The FireTV is connected to the router itself via ethernet, and the Shield is connected to a bridge which connects to the router via MoCA.
She said she’s experiencing this a lot lately and it only started recently. I was able to play files on the Shield at the same time the Fire TV was experiencing this “not fast enough” error with no problems.
FWIW, she said she is also recently experiencing the thing other users have reported where you push play and it just shows the spinning circle forcing you to back out and push play again.*
To repeat, I’m not experiencing any of these with my Shield, so it seems to be Amazon Fire TV specific.
Image from Tatulli taken a few minutes later if that helps:
* The spinning circle thing might be related to some Restricted users aren't allowed to perform this action errors that I see in her logs before we performed our control test to demonstrate the “not fast enough” error. If you want logs for that, let me know, and I’ll post them in the other thread.
Side note: I had to rename the .xml file to .txt because .xml isn’t an allowable format on these new forums? Seems like that’s something that should really be fixed ASAP by the forum dev.
Have you checked the settings in the Plex App on the Fire TV for Video and Audio Quality? Compare the settings with your device settings. I have both Shield and Fire TV devices and mine Direct Play all my content.
Both are set to Maximum. If you look at the image from Tautulli you can see that it’s Direct Playing. I added that in an edit, you might have read my post before I did that
Yeah noticed that in the image after posting. Guess image took a while to show up on my phone because it wasn’t displaying when I started typing the reply. I may download the sample and try it on my devices.
I loaded the sample video into a Movie Testing Library last night and played it from start to finish on one of my Shields and my Fire TV Stick. I did not see the spinning circle or the message about the server not fast enough, but I did have one small issue where the picture froze the first time I played it on both devices. Stopped and restarted it and it played fine all the way through the video. I did notice on one of the devices that the Audio was being transcoded but the Video was Direct Play. Hopefully @sixones was find more through the logs and some of his debugging.
I’m seeing the same as @johnm_ColaSC on a Fire TV 4K (3rd Gen), will see if I can get others on the team to reproduce with an older Fire TV device.
@rwoffice Could it be that your SHIELD has a faster connection to your network than the Fire TV? Based on other information I think this might be caused by our player requesting too much data whilst playing the video, but it’s hard to verify this is actually happening.
I don’t think so. This is happening with lots of files, and while that one has some particularly high bitrate spikes, there’s plenty of other files where she said it’s happening where the bitrate isn’t nearly as high.
For example, here’s another file where it happens where it’s a) a different codec, b) a different resolution, c) a WAY lower bitrate, d) a different container, and probably several other differences I’m not even thinking of:
In this case the entire 42 minute episode is smaller than just the 5 minute sample of the previous file, so obviously it has nothing to do with how fast the connection is or how high the bitrate spikes are.
But, honestly though, a couple of things: first off we’re hundreds of posts into this and you know that just downgrading to 6.12 will fix the issue, so it really has nothing to do with how fast the connection is. Secondly, as shown above, it’s happening on tons of different files, with a myriad of encode settings, so it probably has nothing to do with the specific file, and I never really thought you would be able to easily replicate it. Lastly, there’s almost no information in these logs that could possibly be useful. They just say buffering has occurred and then spit out an error message, I can’t imagine that’s helpful. I think maybe you need to put out a testing release with more debug information if you’re going to start tracking down these Exoplayer v2 issues.
Also, you can get a used 1st Generation Amazon Fire TV on eBay for like $30 if you’re willing to take the time to bid on it, or like $60 if you just want to buy it. Just sayin’
P.S. Thank you @johnm_ColaSC for also taking the time to test the sample. I really do appreciate that.
The videos bitrate won’t really matter as we could be fetching the file multiple times and using up lots of bandwidth no matter the videos size. I’m not sure if you said, but does any file play without the message on the 1st Gen?
Player logs are tricky, if we added enough information to be able to solve most bugs we would be downgrading the performance of the player which can have some crazy effects - this issue could be that we are using too much CPU and the 1st Gen Fire TV doesn’t have the muscle to back it up.
I’m not entirely sure it’s device specific, but someone in the team will have a 1st Gen and be able to test next week. If we still can’t replicate the issue I will share some builds with you.
I had the same issue many months ago and I “solved” it by deleting my Internet upload speed value under Settings/Remote Access leaving it empty.
Not sure why but this setting (at least back then) not only affected remote streams but local streams as well. I’ve never seen the “Your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video.” message again after emptying this setting.
Unfortunately, it’s not my daily driver, so I’m not completely sure. She said it happens a lot, and not every time, but that’s tricky with someone not technically inclined and OCD about it like us. I’ll ask her to start writing down when it happens or doesn’t and see if I can detect a pattern. My sister’s pretty unreliable though, so no promises
Actually, maybe I’ll just swap the Shield and the Fire TV for a week so I can keep track myself. I’ll have to see how feasible that is because of other non-Plex apps.
That’s true, I hadn’t considered that. Though it might be worth at least adding three lines about current CPU/RAM/Network usage when the buffer error occurs. Maybe it’s pegging and redlining or something. There’s about a million PubSub lines, and tons of battery information in some of these logs, you could probably turn those off… especially for the plugged in devices that don’t even have batteries
I’m more than happy to test if it will help you get to the bottom of these problems, so just let me know. Thanks!
So it looks like the first sample you included is using H264 High Level 41 which is not supported on the 1st generation Amazon TV, so this file won’t ever direct play on that device. The logs seem to show it’s playing so im guessing the video was re-encoded in the sample or the logs are from a different play attempt. It looks like the device has been set in the settings to allow level 41, but this won’t work on the Fire TV.
Have you tried these samples on your Fire TV? They appear to be giving different issues with playback for us and nothing like what you have described.
Of course 4.1 is supported, that’s why Plex specifically includes the Level override setting in the app (and yes, I know it’s not guaranteed, but it’s always worked). I have hundreds of 4.1 movies that play… the vast majority of encodes are 4.1+, if they didn’t play then nobody would use Plex on their Fire TV in the first place. Besides which, that file is Direct Playing (see the Tautulli screenshot), and they watched the entire thing after my test. It just buffered with “not fast enough” error a few times during playback.
And it wasn’t re-encode, it was trimmed using MKVToolNix per Plex’s own sample guidelines.
Here’s the diff, they’re the same thing, both with High@4.1:
I posted the media info XML for the real file and the sample file itself, so you should be able to confirm that yourself.
Also, the second “sample” is the entire file, so of course it’s been played on the Fire TV. The log is from when it was playing. And it’s XviD, so obviously there’s no Level issues there.
So I just watched the entire Shark documentary myself on the Fire TV and it didn’t buffer or give a “not fast enough” error a single time.
What does that mean? I literally have no idea
I saved the log, but if it’s just the movie playing top to bottom, so I’m not sure what you could get out of it. I played the movie top to bottom, except for one stop and resume in order to restart the logger. If you think it would be helpful, let me know and I’ll post it
I have that issue on the NVidia Shield TV for quite some time, downgrading the Plex version to what whas preinstalled on the Shield worked tho. Now because that doesnt work anymore since the latest shield update it’s now broken for me permanently. It does play some files fine, and others it doesnt. All my files are Blu-Ray rips i did my self, with the same software. The old Plex was able to play all of them without any issues in direct play mode. Now about 30% still play, the rest wont. You have no idea the ammount of family drama that caused as my kids are used to Plex and it will take a while until i can train the wife, the kids and grandma to use Kodi. But since this issue is super old, and there wasn’t ever any afford to fix it, i doubt this will be different so imma move on.
Have you considered looking at an alternate client on your Shield?
Personally I’m using MrMC but there are other options. Either way it worked fine before the last update and works fine still. (MrMC I mean)
For me the whole look of default Plex on the Shield is awful. I know you shouldn’t need to look for alternatives but generally the server side of Plex is awesome, whilst the clients degrade at a breathtaking pace.
Honestly, since there is no reason why it shouldn’t work with the Shield, and overall the Nvidia Shield is a beast of a device, capable of playing even the most demanding 4K HDR content, it is more likely that i will give up on Plex. Secondly, it is a bit frustrating that it worked fine up to a certain version. So they did break something. Acutally, i’m having troubles on all my android devices with direct play, but on tablets you get the option to not use ExoPlayer and use the native Android player instead, which fixes all issues.
As i said, all the files on my server are encoded by me with the same software (handbreak). I’m encoding HD content as H264 MP4 at 4.1 level, wich is natively supported by all my devices (iOS tablets, android tablets, PS4, Nvidia Shield). And all of those devices have zero issues playing them over WiFi using any other player.
If this issue is rare, it must be my server. But it’s a windows 10 machine running the Plex Media Server, actually a quite beefy one (Ryzen 1800X@4.0ghz, 32GB ram) on a GB Ethernet connection and the Nvidia Shields (i got 2 of those) are on a wired GB connection. So that message that my network isn’t fast enough, considering that its a 20-30mbit stream on a 1000mbit network is rather odd.
So again, i’m convinced that ExoPlayer 2 is the issue. But its not simply a player issue, it’s actually how the bits a requested from the server. I can see on the server that it continuously transmits up to 800mbits of data, streaming a 20mbit video stream. But that doesn’t happen with non ExoPlayer targets.
I am having trouble all of a sudden on my plex. running a shield with cat 6 connection wired all through the house. I used to play these same files on my samsung tv plex player. anyone know what is going on?
For what it’s worth, I’m having this problem as well on my 1st-gen Fire TV. It can (and does) happen on pretty much any video.
Almost certainly related is the fact that my Fire TV’s Plex client simply will not direct connect to my server. I thought I would just configure a manual server, but that option seems to have disappeared for some reason.
Not sure what to do at this point. Plex is essentially unusable on my Fire TV now, and this is the family room workhorse Plex device. I tried moving my Fire TV from WiFi to Ethernet, but that had no effect. (Again, I’m assuming the root cause is the inability to direct connect.)
Same problem here. Can’t play an videos of any format on the Plex apps, Apple (iPhone 6s+ or android Fire Tablet 7). . Downloaded files as Avi or MP4 are stored on Google and Dropbox. Used to work flawlessly about a month or more ago. I have Replaced routers, boosted signal and always get a message “your connection to the server is too slow.” It is absolutely not a signal issue
That really isn’t the same problem at all, as (at least for me) the iOS app works just fine.
I tried backing down to 6.12, which worked (now I could successfully directly connect to the server), but it broke digital suround – my receiver wasn’t getting AC3/DTS/etc.
Ultimately, I solved the problem by running out and buying a Roku Ultra. I think I’m done with the FireTV platform for a while.
