Server Version#: 1.25.0.5282-7000
Player Version#: 1.25.0.5282
Client Platform: Plex.tv website on Windows (Chrome)
Server Platform: Synology NAS
Hello, thanks for taking the time to read this
I’ve been having an issue with Plex for a while. It’s small but annoying. I use the plex.tv website to navigate / view all of my content. I normally leave a Plex tab open 24/7 on my browser. I’ve noticed that if I leave a video open in that tab, then go and do something else for a while and come back to try and play it later, it will play for a moment (what I assume has already been buffered) and then the video will stop playing and never end up buffering more and resuming. A simple refresh of the website fixes this however it seems to happen almost every time I do this.
If you guys could fix this, that would be awesome!
You can actually get this same behavior on YouTube. Personally what I think is happening is that your network adaptor goes to sleep or something similar and when you come back you have to reestablish that connection to get it working again. Try it with YouTube. Play like 30 seconds or a minute of a video, pause it, come back like a day later and try to play it. It will play for a brief moment and then need to reload to get the video working again.
Do you mean you have it paused? You can set Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than X in network settings so it actually stops. Plex will remember your position. This also helps end transcode sessions if you have friends who also leave things paused.
Wow, you’re quick! That’s a good suggestion but unfortunately I do the same thing with YouTube and this doesn’t happen. I also have all of the Power saving / sleep settings on my network card disabled.
Yes exactly. I have the media paused in the tab I leave open. However, this issue also occurs when skipping to the next video rather than just resuming playback of a paused video. I just checked and it looks like I have this Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than X setting set to 0. I believe that should mean this should not be the issue here.
I mean why don’t you have it set for like 5 minutes? Why let it pause for such a long time rather than just stopping it? Not sure how long of a time we are talking about when it happens.
I actually can’t remember setting this to 0. I may have done this when I first set up the server though for the exact reason that I sited before. I have tabs for my common websites open 24/7, so often times when this issue is happening, the video will have been paused for anywhere from 2 hours to multiple days. I realize now though that my previous answer isn’t entirely accurate. This issue also happens if I skip to the next video rather than just resuming a paused video. I understand that this is a minor issue but it’s not so intuitive to someone with less experience that they would need to refresh the window under this circumstance to fix it.
I agree with BigWheel here, why leave those tabs open indefinitely? Why not just make bookmarks and close them when you are done doing whatever you are doing?
Regardless of whether I should be having these tabs left open, which btw is totally a valid preference. There are going to be situations where people forget to close tabs and then they are going to run into this issue as well.
That may be true, but they will probably before anything else try to reload the page and find that it works fine after that. I’m certain it has something to do with the connection being terminated due to inactivity. It would still hold all of what has been loaded in the buffer, and when you try to load more into the buffer the connection has to be re-established (by reloading the page) before it will go back to working normally. This is not weird or unique to Plex. This absolutely happens with YouTube and you may not notice it because it reloads that connection so quickly. I also have my power profiles set to function in the least power efficient way possible, and anytime I leave a YouTube video up in a tab and come back hours later or whatever it will play whatever is held in the buffer and then need to re-establish the connection before playing anymore.
I don’t understand the aversion to letting it actually stop after x minutes via the pref.
The playqueue is created on the server. if there is a loss of connection to the server due to inactivity that play queue might be gone but the player does not know it. is what I am guessing happened.
I think you’re missing my point here. I may very well go and set this Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than X setting as you’ve suggested so that I can avoid having to refresh in the future. I can also just continue refreshing, as it is not much of a hassle. However that doesn’t change the fact that anyone that does what I’ve described here will run into this problem (or at least using a similar setup as myself, which I acknowledge may be rare). If you guys don’t want to fix it, that’s fine. I just wanted to let you know about it. A good solution in my mind would be to just reload the video if it gets into this state, such as YouTube does.
Btw this was intended as a bug report. I searched for a way to report bugs for Plex and it lead me to this forum. I’m going to mark this as the solution as I don’t require any help here.
I think you don’t understand what we are saying. This is not a bug. Something in your network whether it be your PC’s network adaptor, router, or otherwise is killing the connection due to extended periods of inactivity, when this happens Plex or any other streaming service must re-establish that connection before being able to go back to functioning like normal. This is normal for anything that serves up content and why services like Netflix, and Hulu ask you if you are still watching. That does two things for them, allows them to not hold paused streams on their servers forever, and in the event the connection is lost due to an extended period of inactivity it refreshes that connection.
Ok, but the video never re-establishes that connection. This is not normal for services like YouTube and Netflix as they both are able to re-establish the connection in these circumstances without requiring a manual refresh of the web page.
I’m not going to argue about this all night. The behavior is normal. Not a bug. YouTube absolutely requires a refresh of the page, I’ve seen this on tons of computers, both first hand on all 5 of the Windows machines in my house, and from a distance on all the machines I play tech support for with my friends and family. Netflix won’t do this in a webpage because they straight up kill the stream after a certain time of inactivity, but on devices that get around that they absolutely need to refresh to go back to normal. The Netflix Windows app does this for example, and again have personally witnessed this behavior more then once. Hell YouTube Music on my Android phone exhibits this behavior every single day for me when I get out of the car in the morning and leave my music stream paused all day. When I get back into the car at night it has to refresh everything to get back to playing music.
You were not upsetting me I was just trying to understand.
Setting that feature to zero, which is the default, doesn’t actively try to maintain a pause indefinitely. It is the do nothing state, just like before the feature existed. The feature, when adding a positive number of minutes, was meant to help server admins stop the playback, so things like transcode sessions are not kept alive.
