Plex Stuttering

General Discussions
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I have been having this problem ever since I installed PMS over a year ago, but I’ve never had the time to debug it.

I am running PMS on my Windows 10 desktop with a i7-9700k CPU and 32GB ram. Most media is on an external drive but the same challenge persists with local drives. The PC is not in use for any other background services and has low CPU/Memory utilization when the problems occur.

I am running the Plex client on Xbox One connected over Cat 6.

The problem: anytime I start to play a movie, it starts off stuttering, but by pausing the movie and resuming a few seconds later, the problem goes away. This is with Direct Play.

The same problem arises about an hour or more into the movie, sometimes happening as often as every 10 minutes. The stuttering is sometimes unwatchable while other times it looks like the FPS is dropping to 10-15 fps. In all cases it is fixed by pausing, waiting a few seconds, and then resuming.

Logs: I was able to recreate this problem just now while watching a 720p movie. The problem happens at the 13:02 mark and I am attaching verbose logs from 13:00 to 13:03.

Any help is appreciated. Plex Media Server.log (332.7 KB)

1 Like
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Hi, is anyone able to take a look at these logs? Is there a better way to open a support ticket through Plex Pass?

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Hi there, is there a better way to open a support ticked through Plex Pass?

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Plex has no official support model, the contact us page says technical support questions will go unanswered and to use the forums.

As you have seen Plex employee’s no longer interact with questions on the forums.

Basically Plex has no official support and if you run into an issue you are SOL.

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crickets

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@Moussa any chance you can take a quick look at this?

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@Moussa we were watching a movie last night and the same thing is happening. Can you take a look at my logs above and let me know if there’s a problem with my configuration?

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I am no good at Diagnosing log files, however, stuttering on DirectPlay can really only be a handful of things… It’s definitely something slow in your chain. You mentioned the Xbox was hardwired with CAT-6, but you didn’t mention if the server was, so could you clarify that? Anyways, assuming the server is also hardwired, these are some of the problems you could look into:

In No Particular Order:

  1. Xbox is having trouble decoding fast enough (seems unlikely)
  2. Throughput is being hampered by something (Slow or overworked hard drives, Bad network adapter, bad network cable, something causing disk usage, some cache file filling up somewhere, etc. (Seems most likely))
  3. Your network is either not fast enough to sustain, or there’s a problem on the network somewhere that is making packet loss happen or is oversaturating your routers ability to sustain that speed (possibly)

I am sure there are other things, but those are the only ones I could think of off the top of my head… DirectPlay problems are a result of a slowdown somewhere…

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Hi Jason, the entire network is Gigabit, everything from the server, cable to the managed switch, managed switch, able to the Xbox.

Can you tell me more about some cache that is filling up? where can I check that?

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the cache file seems unlikely, but check your page file location, and watch your drive usage during playback, if you see one peaking out at 100%, I’d investigate that and see why…

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