I have a Plex Media Server running on a Synology DS916+ NAS. It works flawlessly on my local network. I have no trouble viewing any of my ripped Blu-rays on any Plex app in my home. They are all encoded with H.265 (HEVC) or H.264 (AVC) with original audio tracks (DTS HD, True HD, etc). The little Synology can handle the transcoding without a problem to my Nvidia Shield TV, Roku TV, PS3, or LG TV. Whatever I throw at it seems to work… at home. Remotely is a different story. Video either won’t play at all or will play for a few seconds and then hang. Music stutters to the point that it is unlistenable. I get 100 Mbps down and 10 Mpbs up from Spectrum. I know I’m not going to get full 1080p original quality video, but I should at least be able to watch 720p and listen to music without any performance hiccups. I have spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting. First I setup a Plex server on my Dell XPS 8900 desktop to see if it was a performance issue with the NAS, but I’m having the same trouble streaming remotely with that Plex server. Then I tried changing the remote port from 32400 to something else thinking maybe Spectrum was throttling Plex connections. That didn’t fix it. Then I connected my cable modem directly to the XPS desktop running Plex bypassing the rest of the network completely. That didn’t fix it. Finally, I went to Spectrum today and swapped out my cable modem for another. You guessed it, that didn’t fix the remote streaming performance issue either. To try and figure out what is going on, I ran iPerf server on the Synology with iPerf client running on my Windows 10 notebook at work. The results are at their lowest average 6.5 Mbps and at their highest 12.2 Mbps leaning more towards the 12 Mbps range. This leads me to conclude that my ISP is not the problem. It has to be Plex. Has anyone else had problems with remote streaming performance, and if so, how did you fix it?
I have seen issues with remote streaming and it only seems to occur with users that are on AT&T U-verse (regardless of client - plex media player, Sony Blu-ray player, Apple TV). They either get low quality with macro-blocking or buffering constantly. The clients have 20Mbps down service and I have Spectrum 20Mbps up. None of my users on Spectrum have an issue using clients such as Roku.
I have had them test where they are the only stream on an i5-3470 which can handle at least 3 if not 5 transcodes at once.
I haven’t found a solution other than telling the users to try and switch from AT&T to someone else :neutral:
So after a couple of days with my new cable modem, the problem seems to have resolved itself. I can now stream Plex remotely at a reasonable quality. I’m not sure why this did not take hold right after the modem was changed. Maybe there was some sort of caching issue.
