Plex Web stops buffering after 2 mins causing playback to stop

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Still buffering indefinitely. 1.25.4.5468 problem persists.

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I have the same issue on version 1.25.3.5409 @ Windows.
Enabling “Use alternate streaming protocol for video playback” seems to mitigate the issue.

I am pretty convinced that the web player just stops asking the server for “media chunks” for whatever reason (no relevant http requests are being made in devtools). The transcoder is still chugging along happily and all other players seems fine playing same media and also much higher bandwidth medias. I assume that enabling the alternate streaming just uses a different flow that does not have this bug.

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@sixones, Can you let us know if this issue is on Plex’s to do list? Many of us have had to roll back to PMS 1.24. Something changed in 1.25 that causes Plex Web to stop playback after about 2 minutes or so.

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I have the same issue, should I roll back to 1.24? TThat’s crazy! No one of Plex team is taking care about this?

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I got pulled into this thread by Mr. Taylor from a separate thread I created on the same issue. After reading through things I have web playback working on server version 1.25.4.5468.

What worked for me was to uncheck Automatically adjust quality (Beta) AND check Use alternate streaming protocol for video playback. With both settings set this way video is direct stream, audio is transcoded from DTS or EAC3 to mp3. I played through both of my test files on chrome based browsers running on Linux and Windows without issue.

Please let me know if you would like me to provide anything to assist in the development of these features.

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Ok, this method is working for me with the latest version of Plex server.

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This solution maybe works, but i think it’s not a solution. I think that “use alternate streaming” must be a option, not a obligation


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All,
Sorry for the delay. Been down with covid and trying to catch up.

Here is a LG test video.

Recommend testing it with
– HW transcoding enabled (you’ll need it for Plex/web)
– Player initially set to 20 Mbps.

Let’s see how this goes and then branch out. I don’t have a problem with this in any of the versions I have but also understand I’m running a Linux desktop.

(It’s a BIG file)

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Hi @ChuckPa
This might be a solution
 but my Server is a QNAP-NAS and has barely enough power for playback without transcoding. So this is not a solution for me.
The only solution that worked for me so far is a rollback to 1.24.

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Hope the Plex team can address this soon. If not, I don’t see myself moving on from 1.24 at all. And to address the frankly disappointing response from the Plex team: Yes, people like me do use Plex-Web frequently (and been happily doing so for years before this issue), and no, transcoding everything or ripping my entire library without re-encoding is not a reasonable resolution and just sweeps this issue under the rug.

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What’s the purpose of testing a 4K video and transcoding if everybody is telling you, and you explicitly acknowledged, that the problem seems to be with Original quality in a browser?

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I just want to add that I’m also having this problem and it was also instantly solved by downgrading to 1.24.

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I’ve also experienced this issue and downgraded to 1.24 as I don’t feel like tech supporting users on my server into altering default settings in the web client.

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What’s the purpose of testing a 4K video and transcoding if everybody is telling you, and you explicitly acknowledged, that the problem seems to be with Original quality in a browser?

@ChuckPa , I agree with @Beans_Baxter. What is the point of testing a 4K video for this issue? This issue is happening on standard def and 1080 videos that do not require transcoding. Do you want anyone to send you additional logs for this?

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Hey everyone,

I have noticed this same issue but only with certain files. I have not downgraded to 1.24.* but will investigate. It would be good to know how to back up the library and import into the new install as I do not want to set up my library’s again.

It will be interesting to see if this is resolved in another few updates. Pity that this issue has been around for some people since October 2021.

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I experience this problem aswell.

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Thank you very much for this workaround

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For those who simply want an easy workaround, as so to rollback to 1.24 :

as sudo :
wget https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-media-server-new/1.24.5.5173-8dcc73a59/debian/plexmediaserver_1.24.5.5173-8dcc73a59_amd64.deb
dpkg -i plexmediaserver_1.24.5.5173-8dcc73a59_amd64.deb

that’s it

Also, you can add this command in order to not update plex media server until there is a correct fix for the problem encountered here :
sudo apt-mark hold plexmediaserver

When the problem will be corrected, we can unhold plexmediaserver package.

Cheers

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@ChuckPa
When looking at the Plex Server Logs I get
[Transcoder] Throttle - Going into sloth mode.
a little bit before the stream stops in Plex Web.

Here is what shows on the Dashboard

Plex Web — Chrome
Playing—4:30 / 1:32:57
Local (192.168.80.140)—3 Mbps

Video
1080p (H.264)
Direct Stream

Audio
English (AC3 5.1)
AAC—Transcode

Do you want me to send you a link to download a file with the issues?
I created a test server on a Linux VM to see it Linux also has the problem and it does. Both Windows servers and Linux servers have this issue.
Currently running Version 1.25.5.5492

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 and this is what happens when I get sick and am not around to keep things right. :roll_eyes: LOL

I’d like to request some help isolating – Server or Web player.

This is easy to do.

  1. If you’ve rolled back to the previous 1.24.x which works,
  2. Open https://app.plex.tv instead of using the bundled server in 1.24.x
  3. Now test playback.

This uses the same Plex/web which is in 1.25.x with the 1.24.x server.

If playback is OK – now we know it’s the server itself and not Plex/web
If, however, playback again fails, we now can dig deeper into Plex/web

1 Like