Server Version#: 1.21.1.3830
Player Version#: 8.11.0.22186
I’ve encountered unpredictable and buffering and pausing, on and off, for several months now and, having tried to eliminate everything I can think of, I’m finally turning to the forums. In the meantime I’ve replaced my router, my Android TV device and restarted my whole library from scratch.
The pausing / buffering occurred twice at 19:16, toward the end of the minute. Looking on the Windows laptop on which PMS is running and in the PMS dashboard I saw nothing of significance change; CPU, memory, network and HD were all well below maximum.
The issue is difficult to reproduce. Sometimes a movie will play without problems for an hour, and later that evening playing the same movie will pause every three minutes until we give up.
What should I be looking at? How can I better diagnose the root cause?
I am having a great deal of buffering on “Plex for Android TV” app (Google Chromecast with Android TV) but when I play the same shows on the “Plex for Vizio” app on the TV itself, there is no buffering.
I installed Tautulli on my server PC and see that “Plex for Vizio” is able to direct play everything without transcoding while the “Plex for Android” (on the same TV) transcodes every show (I believe it is to convert the audio, but there have been several shows where the dialogue stream was stripped out during encoding). My understanding is that the device tells Plex what it is able to play and whether it needs to be trascoded, and this device (in cahoots with the Plex for Android TV app) seems to be lying to Plex.
I have been using Plex for over five years and this is causing me to want to ditch it and replace it. I think it is a relatively new problem due to an update, and I really want it patched.
Edit to update:
In my case, I think the transcoding problem is due to Chromecast with Google TV not passing audio properly to the TV. This forces the transcode and therefore the buffering.
So in my circumstances I don’t believe Plex is the problem.
Similar to my problem (earlier post) your logs seem to show that your Android device is transcoding. (I’m not very knowledgeable on the issue, or WHY it is transcoding.)
Depending on what it is you are trying to watch, your Plex media server most likely ought to be able to direct play your content. Transcoding takes a lot of resources and in my case I am virtually sure it is not necessary but is being forced by the Android app.
Edit to add: In my case, it is entirely possible that my “Chromecast with Google TV” cannot play the audio stream to the TV itself through HDMI and that is what is forcing the transcoding. I’m trying to figure out if that is that case and WHY that is the case. There are no settings or logs to be able to figure it our so far…
