Server Version#:4.45.0
Player Version#:Web client and Apple TV
I have a virtual server on a cloud hosted for Plex watch together with family in different cities. The bandwidth is fine, but with 4 of us watching a movie, it loops a LOT. Like practically every scene, it will loop the same few seconds a bunch of times before moving on. The same experience happens for everyone watching, super frustrating for anyone trying to watch.
The dashboard shows bandwidth bouncing between 8-23 Mbps, which should be fine for a cloud provider, and the CPU utilization is low (after some tests beforehand I increased the CPU count).
I suspect that someone in the group has slower Internet than the rest of us, causing our playback to loop while waiting for them, but in that case wouldnāt they simply run at a lower resolution for that session? I was surprised that I could not find anyone reported this behavior, so maybe thereās a simple fix. Most of us run the web client but one has Apple TV.
Iāll look for a setting (like I have on my TV Plex app) whether the web client can have an increased buffer size to tolerate sporadic Internet speed, but is there anything else I can do? I see the server settings has a beta option to Automatically adjust quality, which I selected part-way during the movie, but Iām not sure if thatās a client-side option or will that affect all sessions (hopefully). I expect there will be comments and speculation about the variety of Internet bandwidth, but Iām especially curious if anyone else experiences this behavior. Tonight is our first tie trying āwatch togetherā in lieu of a family zoom call and someone (me) screen sharing the movie.
I just used Watch Together to watch a few episodes of a show with my co-workers today (total of 5 of us) and we had similar looping to what you are describing. It seemed to happen the most when someone would join the group so Iām assuming their video wasnāt buffered as well as everyone elseās. The start of the each episode we watched would jump back over and over as I think everyoneās stream was catching up.
I monitored the streams using the dashboard and everyoneās stream seemed to be buffered after a while, but we still had sporadic loop backs while watching which was really annoying, especially when itād happen 4-5 times in a row.
Thanks for your post. I believe itās exactly the same issue. Last week I saw your post come in during our weekly movie night while the looping happened again even after each person configured their settings beforehand to dynamically adjust the quality. It was annoying to the point of switching to zoom screen sharing rather than āwatch togetherā. We gave it another try last night with the same behavior, which tells me one person simply canāt participate as well as the rest. Hopefully in the future we can resolve that personās issue.
Weāve been having the exact same experience. Been doing a movie club every Saturday for ~6 months. Plex server cpu/mem never goes over 20% and it has 1Gb up and down dedicated connection. Everyone has a decent internet connection and can play videos individually from the server completely fine. Again a mix of Web client users and others using apps. Weāve tried lowering the quality to minium, just playing nativeā¦ Always rubbish
Most weeks weāve powered through not our last session took us 3.5 hours to to get through a 1.5 hour movie. We were mostly just chatting in the end but the movie was totally ruined.
The fact that thereās people grumbling about getting 2 seconds out of sync after 30 minutes of just so different to our experience.
Have the same issue! I was able to smooth it out some by creating an optimized transcoded version for the TV profile ahead of the viewing, but people joining/leaving seems to create the looping issue.
Started movie night with the family on Thursdays; first movie went fine the entire way without a hitch, 2 remote viewers. Second movie had 3 remote viewers, and we encountered the looping about 3/4 the way through the movieā¦ it smoothed out when one person dropped, but Plex seemed to struggle when they tried to rejoin. Similar server utilization stats as the other posters here.
Would really appreciate someone from Plex looking into this!
Has anyone figured this one out? I have the same issue even with a 2 person watch party. Itās really frustrating and it basically renders the feature unusable
Iāve been having the same issue here. It definitely starts when someone joins after the session has started.
There are 2 of us on the same network as the server and typically 2-4 people outside the network and no matter what, one the people on the network get the repeater issue every time despite good connections. I just upgraded my hardware to a 2600x and 1650 gpu running on unraid but the issue still persists.
Also experiencing this problem. 4 viewers, a 1 hour 40 minute movie. It worked perfectly for 1 hour and 20 minutes, and then became almost unusable at 1:29.
I found that it would resolve itself if I pressed pause, waited for about 5-10 seconds, and then tried to resume. I also noticed a lot of transcoding threads going on, so I rebooted my server and tried Watch Together again. Unfortunately, even though system load went down, this did not help.
I have experienced this issue when one of us is watching from a web client and the show is in Direct Stream mode for anyone. As soon as that person switched the quality dropdown to something that actually does a conversion (uses the transcoder), then all skips stopped for all clients.
YMMV, I dont know. However, this is the solution that we have been using and every time, it solves the issue when it pops up. I can see who is direct streaming in the dashboard, and I just message that person to switch it to some other quality setting that uses the transcoder, and all is fine.
I have been having this issue as well. I host a movie night with coworkers from my Plex server and we often struggle to get it stable and end up just telling everyone to click start at the same time (annoying). Iām usually direct streaming since Iām at home with the server, but Iāll try doing transcode for myself next time.
One other thing to note is that everyone besides me is sharing the same account (staff@company.com), which I was thinking may be contributing to this issue.
I have been using watch together extensively for the last year. I see this happen on occasion, and seems to be linked to the file that is being used and its encoding.
We can both watch a problem file independently, with no buffering issues.
The timelines jump backward and forward, so Iām not sure how I see this as a buffering issue, as I might if things were only jumping forward.
Re-rendering the file with Handbrake seems to fix this issue, even if the file is larger.
I wonder if Plex is somehow utilizing the timecodes in the file (which might be corrupt) rather than the āruntimeā of the file? At this point I get lost in media file formats and is a complete guess. But that is the observations and experience here. I have only had to re-render about 3 movie files at this point.
