"Watch Together" feature on Roku buffering a lot with audio stutters

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.20.1.3252
Player Version#: Roku Ultra 2019 Plex version 6.6.8.6594

When I use this feature with either 1 or 2 friends, we will all get a significant amount of buffering and then on my end as Host and being on the same LAN as the server will get random skip forwards and skip backwards usually in 10-20 second jumps as well as a bizarre audio stutter like someone is pressing the mute button on and off in 1 second increments in a loop. Neither friend as clients seems to get the skip forward or skip backwards or audio stutter. I experimented with Direct Play vs Streaming on my end and they both had Direct Play disabled but all with the same result. We also experimented with one of them initiating the feature instead of myself but had the same result.

All three of us have 1gig up/down fiber internet using hardwired connections to Roku devices and my server can easily handle 35+ concurrent streams so I am not sure why it does this.

2

Does it work if all three of you play at the same time, manually?

I believe “Watch Together” basically coordinates “Play” and “Seek” and “Pause” remote-control actions, but doesn’t change how media is played/streamed/converted/transcoded/remuxed.

I just started a “Watch Together” with two Rokus and an Apple TV and a super slow server. Direct Play for everything here.

3

It does work if we just all watch it on our own at the same time, which is what we ultimately ended up doing.

4

Interesting! Hope somebody can give some suggestions, then - I’m curious to learn more about how it works. That’s not what I would expect.

(I was impressed that “Skip Intro” worked across my “Watch Together” session. Neato.)

5

I think I got this working, so far so good. I have a VPN but I use a bypass for the Plex server so that it doesn’t go through the VPN, well it appears that however the Watch Together feature works, it was causing it to go through the VPN which has terrible bandwidth comparatively. The solution I am using is to just turn off the VPN when I want to use the Watch Together feature. I assume this feature is using a special process or .exe that is otherwise getting missed by the bypass tool.

6

That’s really interesting. I don’t notice media taking a different route when I use “Watch Together”.

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