Server Version#: 1.43.1.10611
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.159.0
So on a recent flight from SFO → SYD, Qantas threw the covers off and announced they had stream quality in-flight WiFi. Challenge accepted! To set the context, I typically use Plex Web on my laptop via Chrome. The in-flight connectivity seemed quite stable with a stable latency of 1s RTT to my Plex server. I could load the landing page and besides the pain of it loading all the artwork for everything, it handled fine. Where things fell over is when I went to play a video - I got nothing. Even toning down the quality to lowest I still didn’t even land on a black screen (i.e. first typically black downloaded frame that gets displayed while the rest buffers). I popped open the Developer Tools and noticed an odd pattern of requests for 0.m4s and 1.m4s repeating over and over. The consistent issue seemed to be that once the request hits 10 seconds in duration it seems the client just terminates/aborts the request. Chrome shows the request as 200 OK.
So out of curiositry I pulled out my iPhone with the Plex app and tried streaming on that. I was able to successfully get a 1.5Mbps stream working on the first go. So same connectivity environment, very different outcome. I then downloaded (while in-flight) the macOS Plex app and tried to play the same video and voila it worked fine.
So when I landed I started attempting to reproduce it on an otherwise “stable” fixed line connection. I am able to reliably reproduce the 10s request killing by setting throttling within Chrome developer tools to 1Mbps down and upstream, 1s latency with 0.1% packet loss.
Curious whether this is a known behavior, if there is anything I could do about it or if y’all would like some more debugging information to diagnose it further.
