Question about how Plex buffers on Chrome

Plex Players
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That’s still a good step in the right direction, certainly gives you more scope of things to look at. And it’s no surprise that’s its the “quantity” not “time” for the Plex client… For you mother-in-law, if she’s capped at 4mbps, (my your own PMS) you’ll likely be transcoding so the quantity of data will probably reflect “time” also :man_shrugging:… To be honest, this is why having a HVEC client would be really good idea, as if it can cope with the stream, you might get away with lower bandwidth. Especially got regular TV?

I used Tdarr, last year, to let it slowly go over all of my non-4k movies and TV shows and just crunch them all down. It saved me a tonne of space… And for the record, my PMS was kinda built to be a transcoding monster (well, little-monster) so it copes with many streams.

I’ve still not testing my “outlandish” way of having PMS and client on the same PC, so that PMS can dish things out locally. It’s on my todo list, but it might be a few more days before I can give it a go :+1::wink:

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HVEC kills my server when the client doesn’t support it, so not an option yet.

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@Kilgry How have you got on with this? I had a “test” marked on my geeky “to-do list” to test out the Plex Windows Client + PMS on same computer, so I’ve been working on that a little over the past couple of days.

Just as a reminder, can you get the Plex Windows Client, to sync/download TV to said PC, then have a new PMS hosted on the PC to them serve local copies of the files. So having a user called “MIL” (mother-in-law :rofl:) who has access to the main/your PMS kick starts it all. The remote (at her house) PWC (Plex Windows Client) connects to your PMS and is set to download X number of episodes of a given show. This dumps copies to her PC. Then her PMS instance has libraries to monitor the “sync” folders. This is then advertising those libraries to anyone connected locally to her PMS. So her TV (box/whatever you managed to get to her :wink::+1:) is setup to see the local libraries. As they’re marked as watched, the PWC will eventually see this (it takes upto a few hours) and will download the next episodes.

It actually seems to work, there were a couple of things I noted:

  • The Plex Windows Client can sometimes just stop/crashed? Well, it only did it the once…
    This could be that my fresh W10 VM isn’t activated with a key? But I’d be thinking on a simple script to just check for the task and then re-start it, if it’s dead? Maybe adding in a pause so you can catch the script if you didn’t want it to re-start? Just an idea…
  • The actual TV client needs to have remote PMS libraries un-pinned from the main screen.
    I didn’t do much testing here, but my client would show both the new local PMS and my remote PMS. So to stop confusion, you should remove the remote PMS from the screen
  • The “Sync Your Watch State and Ratings” feature in Plex/PMS does indeed work.
    It does take a varied amount of time to trickle over to the main PMS, but it does eventually trigger the Plex Windows Client to download the next X episodes

It’s crazy that Plex themselves haven’t done more to help with situations like this. I know for a fact people have asked to have a 2nd instance of PMS that allow Sync’ing from a source PMS. So people can take a PMS with them on holiday/campervan, so the kids can watch what they want from their own devices (e.g. phones). And/Or so that people can get over this hump of transcoding live streams and just allow remote clients to sync files.

Plex for Android TV is a prime example where you should be able to attach an SSD and just tell the app to sync unwatched episodes. Exactly like the Android app does on phones! I don’t know why this, specifically, isn’t implemented.

Anywho… I hope your “project” has been progressing and that you’ve go things figured out for your mother in law. The above does seem janky, but does seem to work. I’m going to leave it running for a while and periodically just mark an episode as watched and just see if it keeps on working. There’s no reason it shouldn’t :man_shrugging:

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Not crazy. Rather very rational self-protection from getting sued into oblivion by copyright lawyers, for aiding and abetting copyright infringement on a mass scale.

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Regarding limited space which is something I’ve had and also have from time to time; I have one user with a particularly low bandwidth limit each month. Connection is fast enough to watch most of my content direct streamed but that would quickly eat through the data cap. So she tells me what she wants to watch, I optimize that to a low bitrate (often SD) and then she streams that. When she is done, I remove the optimized versions and optimize the next show she says she wants to watch.

That said, I have 6TB of total storage for my media and about 200GB free which might be more than you have to worry about but I don’t want to go below 150GB free which I use for other non Plex stuff.

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Let me give you the latest update…

Things ran quite well for a week or so: fast buffer load to my MIL (mother-in-law) client and then the usual “heartbeat” data stream. But, after that week she is getting a lot of buffering due to low data streaming.

I can’t figure out what the heck has gone wrong. I used TeamViewer to get on her PC and ran several speedtests to the east coast of USA. All of the results showed 60+ Mbps down and about 5-10 up and pings were about 250-280ms, however I would see severe buffering on Plex streams at the same time.

So, I installed a VPN on her PC, wondering if she was being throttled and did speedtests. Was about 20 Mbps, which I would expect and still no difference with Plex streaming resulting in buffering.

I then, from my own home, VPNed to Australia. My streaming results were about the same as hers: lots of buffering. I then VPNed to France and New Zealand. Same poor results.

Why the heck can she speedtest at such high rates yet only get 1-4 Mbps from my Plex server? Is there something about Plex not tolerating pings over 250ms?

If I VPN across the USA or find another country that is less than 200ms in latency, I can stream from Plex just fine.

FYI, I have several others streaming from my Plex server in the USA just fine. It’s just my MIL and when I attempt to VPN out to farther countries. But, 250 and even 300ms isn’t that bad surely???

Anyway, I don’t really know what is going on yet. I’m hoping to setup some FTP downloads from my server to my MIL as a test. I figure if she can download large files from my PC at anything close to 20 Mbps, she should be able to stream at 4 Mbps without issue.

It is frustrating, but did Otto warned me. What I can’t let go of is the fact that my MIL is speedtesting at 60 Mbps (and 20 Mbps with VPN) to the city my Plex server is in.

I’m somewhat suspicious of how things went for great to poor so quickly and obviously. Is it a Plex update issue? Doubt it but I’m trying to find what is going on and everything is up for debate in my head.

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@OttoKerner thanks for the slap across the face :person_facepalming:… I’m sure that if this were the case, then the whole sync/download functionality wouldn’t be implemented at all? Heck, adding “friends” outside of your own users in PMS, would also be off the table?

And by that token of thought, that means even Plex allowing the addition of Film “information” (metadata) for films that may (may!?) not have been released on Blu-ray or digital download, should not be allowed?

Is even transcoding a digitally downloaded file legal? Altering the file?

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I’ve taken my hatred of all things cable tv, monthly streaming fees and commercial supported media to high levels. It has been an engrossing hobby and bends people’s minds on how I spend money building my media collection (second-hand stores can be amazing). My collection is several times larger than 6TB. Optimizing my collection would require a hefty amount of drive space.

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IMO, let the lawyers figure it out and be grateful for what we do have in this space.

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One thing I learnt years ago was that client to client (ISP to ISP) connections can be flaky: In that I used to run a WAN (as part for my job) between two offices and it would sometimes just go really slow and drop out. The distance isn’t really relevant, but the ping time would be around 5ms :man_shrugging: After speaking with the ISPs, it was diagnosed that some system/ISP between the two ISPs (out of the ISPs hands) that was dropping the ball as the traffic wasn’t seen a business critical. We eventually got it sorted, but it was a lesson learned.

From what you’re describing, the traffic bandwidth to the general internet, at each end, is good. But traversing between the two ISP/connections is where you’re getting the dropouts. I would say “run a pathping script periodically to monitor the status of availability and timings”, but this could just be redundant all things considered :face_holding_back_tears: Thougj no harm in trying, to soothe the curious mind :man_shrugging:

Without telling MIL and if you can gain easy access to her computer, you could setup PWC and PMS in the “odd janky way” and monitor what it does? I’ve noted that the date/time stamp for the files downloaded to the remote end keep the time of when it was received :wink: She’d still be watching from your PMS, but the Sync Watched (feature) would filter between PMSs and “should” just copy of the next unwatched files automatically? It would be interesting to know how PWC copes with a connection dropping out during a transfer/download. I’d bet it would re-try again :man_shrugging:… The only down side would be if it’s trying to copy over a new file when she’s already watching something?

So… Here’s another silly/stupid idea… Run the PWC as a service? Either with the Windows sc command or nssm? That way you could schedule PWC to only run at certain times of the day? Which is fine if all it’s used for is sync/download. So if MIL has enough pre-downloaded episodes, she won’t run-out between PWC schedules? :man_shrugging:

I’m going to look at my test setup and I’ll mess with SC and NSSM, I should be able to tell from the logs if PWC is shutting down gracefully or not :man_shrugging: I might be able to test download/sync issues also, but it’s hard over a LAN to “fake” network issues, especially in a virtual environment :rofl::man_shrugging:

(One day we should know MIL’s name :blush::grin: But I do like the pseudonym :wink::rofl:)

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@Kilgry … I’ve not done too much testing, but overall it’s working. PWC (Plex Windows Client) won’t run as a service, so I do need to right a script to control the opening and restarting of the app. But overall it does what it says on the tin :man_shrugging:

More testing to be had… I’ll post back when I get some more time.

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