Remote quality issues, playback pauses on its own

Plex Media Server Remote Access
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1

Server Version#: 1.19.3.2740
Player Version#:8.0.1.17411

Fairly recently I have been having issues playing back content remotely - both on the Shield as well as on my phone (Samsung Note 10). I have remote streaming set to maximum and “automatically adjust quality” enabled. I am noticing that in the dashboard, the playback shows direct play at 9Mbps but the playback will freeze up very frequently. Additionally, the dashboard playback status changes from “playing” to “paused” without anyone pausing it on their own. My internet speed at home is ~1400Mbps down and 42Mbps up and the devices I am trying to play on remotely have good speeds as well (phone average is around 50-75Mbps and the shield is hard wired on Comcast 250Mbps package.

If I manually force the quality to "Convert to 720p HD High 4Mbps) it will play back without a hitch it seems. Remote access shows that plex is fully accessible outside my network.

For what its worth, Tautulli is setup to alert me to certain things such as the server being down, errors etc and I have gotten a LOT of alerts lately about the transcode decision changing and playback sessions pausing/resuming (automatically) around the same time.

So if I force original quality, direct play pauses/stops on its own, convert automatically pauses/stops on its own, forcing to 720p 4Mbps seems to work perfectly all day long. My gateway running Unifi OS takes snapshots of speed tests and I am consistently above 40Mbps for the upload.

Things I have tried -
-Rebooting modem, gateway, switches, APs.
-installing all available Windows updates, Plex updates, and restarting the server.
-changing the port in use
-disabling the firewall and all AV software
-disabling all intrusion prevention systems in the gateway temporarily

It all works flawlessly internally. I’m tempted to try setting up a VPN and accessing it remotely to see if that works. I wouldn’t think Comcast would be doing anything to limit streaming/upload but I can’t say for sure. These issues did start when people started working from home more with the stay at home orders. I did a fresh reboot, opened plex and played back something remotely on my phone set to convert automatically - it kept starting and stopping on its own, and the dashboard showed that playback was paused then would start on its own. I downloaded logs right after that so I tried to isolate 2-3 mins of activity to make it easier to sift through but I still have no idea what I’m looking at. I did see though it has somewhat private into so I would prefer to not post them on the forums but send them to support directly if possible?

Thanks for any suggestions, feedback and help you can provide!

2

I did some more playing around with this today and brought my shield to a family members house whom also has gigabit internet. Selecting “convert automatically” would choose the proper full quality direct stream for a TV episode but would just freeze up on the screen randomly. No buffering notice on the TV, no alert in Tautulli saying a stream was buffering, no icons or notifications of any sort on the TV other than a frozen picture and no sound.

I loaded up Plex Dash and sure enough the show I was watching would show a paused indicator and then resume again on its own. I found the server logs section and started a stream and looked for anything obvious when it was pausing and took a few screenshots but since I don’t have any idea of what the log would look like when its working properly I have nothing to go off of.

I see a bunch of yellow time stamps, I am thinking those may be out of the ordinary events? I have a lot of “14728 - Ignoring unexpected message in the notification stream: hello”

Other than that normal looking stuff such as

[Now] Device is Android
[Now] Profile is Android
[Now] Updated play state for /library/metadata/214903
statistics: reporting active playback in state 0 of type 4
Completed (lists IP address) 200 GET /:/timeline?audiostreamID
Auth: Authenticated use 1
Request (lists IP address WAN) get /status/sessions (19 live) TLS GZIP

Then ignoring unexpected message in notification stream: hello

Can anyone see anything overtly wrong based off of those basic logs? Local playback 100% fine, remote playback is only good if forced to 720p.

Thanks again, this is really frustrating so I appreciate any assistance. I wish Plex offered a paid service to look over logs and give you a heads up of whats going on :confused:

3

Since it seems everybody is dying to see a resolution to this, here it is seemingly.

As soon as Comcast updated the firmware on my new XB7 gateway the issue went away. Nevermind the fact that I tried bridging it, placing everything in the DMZ etc - the only fix was a firmware update.