I first wanted to say bravo to the dev team for creating a fantastic product! I am a Plex pass user and I support as much as I can and the following is intended to further improve the product. Please let me know if I can provide additional details if needed. It seems there is a discrepancy between the settings for bandwidth limiting and actuall bandwidth measured. (see older post https://forums.plex.tv/t/pixilation-live-tv-crashing-plex-media-server-flooding-clients-roku-players-affected-as-maybe-others/390548
Server Version#: 1.18.4.2171 ) I could perhaps do another network capture and view the dashboard to see what has changed since this post.
Player Version#:6.4.9.6453 (current plex preview as of Jan8th 2020)
Notable things about my setup that may be relevant, but others may have different setups:
CONVERT VIDEO WHILE RECORDING - transcode enabled
Tuner: HDHomeRun with 4 tuners, latest firmware, and software (as of Jan8Th 2020)
Server: dedicated coffee lake Intel i7 -8700k, GPU Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 6MB,
Plex hardware accelerator enabled
Remove Commercials enabled
Internet upload speed set 9MBs
Limit Remote stream bitrate 3MBs (I initially set this to 8MBs but everything failed to playback despite having the bandwidth
The remote network used for testing 10MBs down, 1.5Mbs up.
Roku is connected via 1GB switched network to Roku on main network with the server, the remote system is wireless 5Mhz network from router. Rokus are Ultras.
Remote system shows 'limited to 3MB ’ as per the server setting for remote bandwidth limiting
Question#1) Several bugs, some that have been reported before but have not gotten a response. Please advise if you wish to have multiple posts, one per bug or can they all be addressed here?
Q#2) it is possible the same bug is responsible for what is being reported as separate bugs, these are more like use cases with failures, but not knowing the workings of the system it is difficult to say what is what and each may require different questions to get to the bottom.
Q#3) The problems below seem to be with MPEG-2 playback, and one response was that Roku (some devices?) do not support, but isn’t that the purpose of transcoding if needed? I have tried enabling MPEG-2 playback and disabling it on Plex client with the same results.
Bug#1: LiveTV - playing content on an external network, (my plex server is on 200MB down 10mb up
, Playback on the remote system (described above) the playback begins, it tries re-spooling several times then after 3 attempts it errors out saying the server is not fast enough for playback., Even setting the Roku client properties to 1mb it fails. 768k seems to play 90% of the time. The strange thing that I noticed is this playback speed DEPENDS ON THE TV show selected. Two TV shows, each recorded at an 8MB bitrate, one will play fine, the other will error out EVERY TIME. This may be TWO separate issues?
B#2 Live TV - selecting TV show in progress, selecting ‘start from beginning’ - (and the result may be different when the show has since ended during the process of playback) when fast-forwarding, the time-stamp shown frequently does NOT relate to what is played back after fast-forwarding/.rewinding. I suspect this is due to the ’ convert while recording’ is enabled, where commercials are removed, but the timeline/search line is NOT updated to reflect the difference in length of the program. I would suggest the timestamps shown when fast-forwarding should find the closest time available in the recording. So long as the preview of the time is accurate, you should just show it at that point since folks will see where they want, then ‘jump’ the displayed time on the search timeline bar to show where you actually are in the program. TO get fancy, you could show an indicator where commercials were removed during fast-forward /rewind and even if the user "holds fast forward/rewind to skip to the next/previous commercial removed and start playback? Or a better experience would be during a FF RW search, remap up/down to be next commercial cut or previous commercial cut? NOTE: this was reported at least once back in 2018 https://forums.plex.tv/t/fast-forward-or-skipping-forward-on-recorded-tv-doesnt-work/221581 and https://forums.plex.tv/t/roku-force-direct-play-on-an-mpeg-2-stream-no-longer-can-fastword-rewind-forces-playback-from-beginning/347200
B#3 Live TV - during a show in progress, selecting ‘play live ’ - then rewinding, same issue as above, but also if you ‘return’ to guide then select the same program, then you select ’ start from beginning’ instead of starting over, it plays live, when when you try to rewind, it will only play the live feed.
B#4 - when temporarily connecting main network Roku from wired to wireless, the streaming fails after 3 attempts. I have to limit at the client down to 4MB for stable viewing, despite having a wireless connection speed of 200mb to the internet, and over 500mb locally. I suspect this is same problem that is seen on remote systems described above, but due to latency, it must be limited much more.
I can provide logs if needed, but as I understand it, these are reproducible problems.
Thanks in advance for any feedback/questions / and especially if there is something here that is already known/ being worked on that you let me know!
cheers!
