Plex Web Player & Pauses

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Server Version#: 1.32.1.6999
Player Version#: 4.108.0 (Web Interface)

Love the app, but there have been lingering problems that have been going on for months. For the purpose of this post, however, I would like to draw attention to the Plex Web Player.

Namely, if an item is started and later paused for some length of time, upon returning and playing, the item will eventually freeze (as if to suggest it’s buffering). It will never recover from this state, no matter how long I wait. I must refresh the page to recover before hitting play once again.

It does not happen immediately upon hitting PLAY after the delay. It would appear the Plex Web Player still has buffered content. Once that buffer runs dry, though, the Web Interface doesn’t appear to be getting any transmitted data.

This has been going on for a long time now. I would have hoped this was resolved. Please let me know if I can provide any other feedback to help resolve this issue.

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  1. In general: don’t pause for longer periods. Plex will store your playback progress even if you Stop.
    Background: pausing will keep the server and the transcoder process running, therefore wasting energy, and producing uselessly server load.
  2. Settings - Server - ‘Show Advanced’ - Network - “Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than”
1 Like
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Thank you for replying. If I may ask, in what way am I producing useless server load? Would not Plex automatically throttle the process when a buffer limit was reached? No data would be being transferred and nothing would be transcoded, no?

Further, I am not describing long periods of time (i.e. hours). Many of them are for 5-10 mins as I step away from my desk to perform other tasks. Really seems like a Plex issue, not a me issue. It’s not at all clear to me why Plex wouldn’t handle that situation better. I haven’t done any testing, but I don’t think Plex is sending/transcoding in that state, which makes the “buffering” action fake. Clearly it isn’t connection to the server or availability of the media as hitting refresh immediately allows playing.

This is a bug by my estimation.

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I have done as you suggested, thank you for your knowledge.

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Agree on treating this as a bug.
Actually Plex Web fails to continue after pause in ~3-5 minutes.
IMHO it not a long period, but normal/usual pause.

Player on Android & AndroidTV does NOT demonstrate such a behavior, so far I see.

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As far I see in Plex Server Dashboard:

  • Plex on Android TV when playback paused - still transfer some info from server to player every ~10 seconds;
  • Plex Web - do not. Probably TCP connection timeout happens and browser do not re-establish connection, but only playing already downloaded peace/chunk.
    Just guess.
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