Server Version#: 1.32.5.7349 - but irrelevant
Player Version#: 4.112.0 - but irrelevant
Watch Together is buggy as heck and has been from the beginning. A friend of mine bought a new house and Internet can’t be installed for another week. He has been living off his cell phone hot-spot for the past week. He can stream MAX QUALITY just fine over it from Netflix, Prime Video, Disney Plus, and Hulu - no issues. Yeah, it’s not a great connection, but that’s why Tech Jesus invented “buffering” 20 years ago. Guess what? No matter what we try to Watch Together from my Plex Server, it won’t play (even if we both set to 160p quality) more than 20-30 seconds without “looping” the last several seconds of footage of whatever we’re watching, often times 3, 4, 5 times in a row before resuming, then quickly doing it again.
This is a fundamental flaw in your technology. I run my Plex server from a refurbished Dell R620 server on Windows Server 2022 with a 24-core CPU with 128GB of RAM, SSD storage for O/S drive, and RAID 10 spindle disks in my Synology over a stable 1Gbps ethernet link to the server. We literally tested watching together an hour later where he went back to his old place that still has regular cable Internet and the issue doesn’t happen.
There are fundamental flaws in Watch Together that NEED to be addressed. Historically we also have to deal with things not resuming from pause off and on even when we’re both on great connections. (I’m hosting from a 1Gbps down 50Mbps up cable Internet connection.) Also, his side quickly fills up the buffer indicator every time we start, so it’s not like it can’t buffer; this is just broken. I suspect that Watch Together’s underlying “technology” reacts very poorly to latency spiking, unstable jitter, or both - and there’s no call for it. I work in IT. Please fix this and soon.
