PLEX settings driving me insane!

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1

Hi all, can anyone please help!

My media files are stored on a portable hard drive (call it the F: drive) on a desktop computer, which runs my Plex Media Server and is part of my wireless network. My router is connected (wired) to my Amazon Fire TV, which houses my Plex Player.

In the past, I have had the Fire TV talking to the router wirelessly, I have tried Plex on a Roku 3 (wired and wireless) and on an Apple TV. Each setup has worked fine for a period of time, but then … just … worsened.

The PMS (currently v1.13.6.5339 - hence up-to-date as I have a PLEX PASS) is shown as “Nearby” on its host machine and it has Remote Access. To be honest, we only ever use it at home, so the Remote Access is pretty unnecessary for us. If we ‘sacrificed’ this, can we benefit in any other way?

Optimize doesn’t seem to work for us, though I am confused as to what I should be optimizing for (e.g. Fire TV is Android, but the device that the content will be viewed on is a TV, not a phone or tablet).

Generally, my issues seem to manifest themselves in the form of some kind of connection problem. It sometimes says that the connection to the server has been lost, yet the server is fine. Sometimes, it says my network isn’t powerful enough to stream the file content. My internet is quite slow (about 4Mbps), so all things being equal, I would have said it’s probably down to that, but then my Plex system has worked fine in the past with the exact same files. Moreover, I can try to play a file via the Fire TV with no joy, but then it will play perfectly on my iPhone or my Android phone.

I would be interested in ANY advice on this whatsoever. Is there any way of capturing what is going on via some kind of log file? If so, how do you do this?

I can provide details of all the settings I use on my PMS as well as details of how I use Plex on my Fire TV.

I have tried all kinds of combinations of settings and I think that where I have them now is fairly close to where I need to be, but I would really appreciate it if someone could take me through how to tweak it so that it works more frequently?

Better still, are all the PMS settings fully explained in a single place anywhere.

Hoping to hear back sometime soon!
Regards,
Simon.

3

Hi trumpy81,

Thanks for getting back to me. Taking your points in turn:

  1. I did already have a static IP address on the server machine.
  2. ‘Network interface to listen on’ was set to All, so I have made the change you suggested. However, why is this better than All, since surely All includes the specific IP address?
  3. OK, I will ignore Remote Access from now on.
  4. Re: Optimize, I had thought this wasdoing something more than just a conversion of the type that a code such as Handbrake can do. I will switch to using Handbrake as you suggest - I used to use it in the past anyway. Do you have any tips for which settings to use?

Thanks again.
Simon.

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