A buddy and I are having watch together sessions in our respective houses. We’re using my Nvidia Shield as server with me on Roku/Shield and him using web app.
About 9 times out of 10, the video will start for me but will loop back every few seconds while his feed fails to load. Sometimes the video will load and play just fine for both of us.
Remote access is all green and network speed tests on both our ends show no issues. The video is direct streaming to both of us so no transcoding.
No transcoding, good internet, low CPU and bandwidth usage
Everything plays fine if everybody watches the file independently.
The worst part is restarting the movie. All parties have to exit, clear the selection from their watch together, mark the episode as watched, then unwatched, reinitiate a new watch together session, and one person has to FF back to the spot you left off at. (Which can also trigger the looping/buffering)
I don’t dare FF or pause any session because it gives me anxiety LOL
This has happened with every conceivable combination of client. Wi-fi, ethernet, Roku, Fire TV, Plex for Windows app, phone, tablet, browser, ect…
Although this can happen at any time, I notice this more often and more severely on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes when I try to initiate the watch together it won’t even connect to the sever to begin with and just gives an error message telling me to try later.
That leads me to believe that the problem lies in the relay servers that keep these streams connected and synced in real time. Are those servers overloaded at peak hours Plex?
Just guessing…
There are multiple other posts about this, which had no response from Plex so I’m left to speculate.
One user suggested reencoding your media with handbrake, but I already do that
First of all, you have my sympathies friend. I understand the anxiety that this causes when people’s remote streams are buffering for no reason.
I’ve learned a lot in the past couple of months and have more or less figured out the issues on my end now. Recommend you try the following:
Server Side:
Plex Relay: This must be turned off. Only enable if you have no choice as this service is limited to 1mbps for free accounts.
Remote Access: Regularly check that the green “fully accessible” light remains on on this tab as it can flick off unexpectedly without notice. For best results, in your router, turn off UPnP and manually forward the Plex port (32400).
Upload Bandwidth: If your router does not support Quality of Service (QoS), ensure all upload-heavy services are paused eg., torrent clients.
Disk Speed: Prefer internal instead of external HDDs for faster transfer speeds to better support multiple streams simultaneously.
Client Side:
Client App: At time of writing, there is still a bug on Plex for Mac that makes direct play/stream buffer constantly and also requires higher bitrates for each session. Thankfully Plex HTPC has since been released which is a night and day improvement
Remote Quality: Ensure each user caps their remote quality to be slightly under your ISP’s upload limit or their own download limit, whichever is lower ie., If your upload limit is 20mbps then one person would set their quality to 20mbps, two would be 10mbps each. If one user’s download limit is 5mbps however, they must set theirs to 4mbps etc.
Force a Transcode: If direct play still fails after all the above, ask users to set playback quality one level below “original.” This forces a transcode which seems to smooth out any hiccups in the stream like bitrate spikes.
Sorry for the long reply. I wanted to share all my findings in the hopes it helps someone else avoid these pitfalls.
