PMS unable to play 4K UHD titles

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171
Player Version#: 4.12.3

I finally jumped on the 4K UHD bandwagon a few months ago and started purchasing and ripping 4K UHD movies into PMS. For a while everything was great. Then a few weeks ago I started having issues streaming these movies to my Nvidia Shield TV. The movies would play for maybe 30 seconds and then pause for about 15 seconds before resuming playback. The constant pausing made watching these movies impossible. There are no issues with HD and SD content. I haven’t made any changes to my network, which is hard wired Gigabit Ethernet. I then discovered that if I tried to play these 4K movies within PMS on the PC where the movies are stored, I get the same behavior - constant pausing during playback. So maybe the issue lies with PMS and not my network or client. I have other software on my PC that plays my ripped 4K movies just fine so I know it’s not my PC. Any suggestions for figuring this out?

2

FYI, this is what PMS shows when I try to play the file over my network to my Nvidia Shield TV:

image

3

It isn’t the client device. The Nvidia shield TV is more than capable. Are you viewing through Kodi? Or using the Plex app on the device.
What storage are you using for your media?

4

I use Kodi and the Plex app on the Shield. Both have the same issue. I use Seagate and Western Digital 8TB internal hard disk drives in my PC to store my media. At the moment I have 8 drives with a new 14TB drive on order.

5

the shield is plenty capable of 4k without buffering, and if the dashboard says direct play, then the server is not transcoding (which is good).

this leaves the following possibilities, of which you must troubleshoot and figure out.

  • client problem – possible bad app hogging the shield cpu/ram/network (did you try rebooting the shield?)
  • network problem – a bad cable or hub or other connection can cause excess network traffic to flood and/or block out other trafic
  • disks – a disk about to fail can have a hard time reading consistently and cause random buffering (disk can’t read fast enough)
  • server problem – just because something else works, does not mean the problem is not with your pc. Malware or other background app can hog resources on the server, just like on a client. Have you rebooted the server?

finally, has it always buffered on the shield, or is this something new or recently changed from working?

other than guesses, you are going to have to monitor the logs whenever buffering is happening in order to figure out what is going between the plex client and pms.

you can watch logs real time @ Plex Web > settings > console

you can download logs @ settings > troubleshooting > download logs

1 Like
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I’ve rebooted both the Shield and the server many times, but no change. The only apps on the Shield I use are Kodi, Plex, YouTube, and Netflix. None of which hog system/network resources when not in use.
Network traffic is minimal when I’m not streaming content and my bandwidth is more than sufficient for multiple 4K streams.
None of my hard drives show signs of failure and I get data transfer rates of up to 190 MBs/sec when moving files between drives.
When I’m not streaming content, my PC shows CPU usage of less than 1%, memory usage of 20%, Ethernet traffic from 0 to 24 Kbps.

As I said in my original post, everything worked fine up until about maybe 3 weeks ago. I’ve torn my hair out trying to figure this out. The only thing that I’m not sure how to test is the PMS software. I’m tempted to wipe my server and start over on a clean boot drive (Samsung 256GB M.2 SSD with 166GB free space). Or maybe try Emby to see how it compares.

7

although it talks about xiomi box, first read @ New player wont play any 4k HDR files and see if any of that is applicable

while streaming a problem video/buffering

8

Pretty sure its the same problem i was having. (I am the one who originally posted the article "New player wont play any 4k HDR files).

On the shield, go into setting/advanced and turn off the new player and switch back to the old, I am willing to bet that will fix it.

We are basically waiting till Plex confirms its a bug and fixes it. From the logs I was told plex is changing the audio bitrate to match the video bitrate and its causing the video to crash.

9

@jcthrower
Unfortunately, 95% of my viewing is through Kodi, so your suggestion doesn’t really apply to me. I only use Plex on the Shield for TV shows, and none of them are 4K. Thanks for the suggestion though.

@TeknoJunky
The Xiomi discussion doesn’t really apply to me either due to the fact that I rarely use Plex on the Shield and none of what I watch using Plex is in 4K. I’ll post another screenshot of the Plex Web Dashboard soon. How do I find the logs in PMS?

10

There is a new player for plex android tv, you should double check settings and toggle it off or on and see if that makes a difference.

Pms logs at plex web - settings - troubleshooting - download logs

Or something similar

11

Here’s the log file after the movie paused a few times. Note that the movie is playing in Kodi on my Shield TV, not Plex:

[
{
“type”: “info”,
“host”: “127.0.0.1:32400”,
“userAgent”: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0”,
“browser”: {
“platformVersion”: “10”,
“id”: “firefox”,
“name”: “Firefox”,
“version”: “72.0”,
“gecko”: true,
“platform”: “Windows”,
“platformID”: “windows”,
“platformModifierKey”: “ctrl”
},
“version”: “4.12.3”,
“primaryServerUrl”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/”,
“primaryServerAuthToken”: true,
“username”: “kthompson67”,
“cloudUrl”: [
{
“scheme”: “https”,
“address”: “plex.tv”,
“uri”: “https://plex.tv”,
“testState”: “connected”,
“isBundled”: false,
“isFallback”: false,
“relay”: false,
“isUntested”: false,
“isPending”: false,
“isConnected”: true,
“isUnauthorized”: false,
“isUnavailable”: false,
“isFailed”: false,
“isAborted”: false,
“isLoopback”: false,
“isPrivate”: false,
“isHttps”: true,
“isSecure”: true,
“isPlexDirect”: false,
“currentTest”: null,
“sources”: [
{
“id”: “internal”
}
]
}
]
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 3,
“message”: “[Vote:vtmqnnpmryit9d0lu9gq3m52] Upvote, refreshing my leader time”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:44:59.661Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:06.460Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:06.462Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:11.460Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:26.471Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:26.472Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:31.471Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/status/sessions?X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”,
“Accept”: “application/json”
},
“responseLength”: 24558,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:34.799Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:46.481Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:46.482Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:51.482Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 3,
“message”: “[Vote:vtmqnnpmryit9d0lu9gq3m52] Upvote, refreshing my leader time”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:45:59.661Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:06.491Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:06.493Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:11.491Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:26.503Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:26.504Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:31.502Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:46.513Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:46.514Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:51.513Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 3,
“message”: “[Vote:vtmqnnpmryit9d0lu9gq3m52] Upvote, refreshing my leader time”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:46:59.661Z”
},
{
“type”: “navigation”,
“route”: “logs”,
“args”: [
null
],
“fragment”: “#!/logs”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:47:01.483Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Opening long poll to Kens PC at http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:47:06.524Z”
},
{
“type”: “ajax”,
“url”: “http://127.0.0.1:32400/player/proxy/poll?deviceClass=pc&protocolVersion=3&protocolCapabilities=timeline%2Cplayback%2Cnavigation%2Cmirror%2Cplayqueues&timeout=1&X-Plex-Product=Plex%20Web&X-Plex-Version=4.12.3&X-Plex-Client-Identifier=lm668m502hsmncnis93uqy35&X-Plex-Platform=Firefox&X-Plex-Platform-Version=72.0&X-Plex-Sync-Version=2&X-Plex-Features=external-media%2Cindirect-media&X-Plex-Model=bundled&X-Plex-Device=Windows&X-Plex-Device-Name=Firefox&X-Plex-Device-Screen-Resolution=2176x1094%2C2176x1224&X-Plex-Token=TOKEN&X-Plex-Language=en”,
“status”: 200,
“headers”: {
“Accept-Language”: “en”
},
“responseLength”: 0,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:47:06.525Z”
},
{
“type”: “log:message”,
“level”: 2,
“message”: “[Companion] Poll connection successfully opened with Kens PC”,
“time”: “2020-01-09T03:47:11.524Z”
}
]

Here’s a screenshot of the current activity in PMS:

image

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