Watch Together - Reasonable Expectations? Wasn't an initially smooth experience

Plex Labs
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I just had my first semi-successful “Watch Together” session. It had its issues and I am wondering what type of expectations should I have for the feature?

Both parties were using Plex on Rokus. I was local and the other party was remote. Their connection was 300 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up (cable internet). We are geographically separated by about 50 miles. The remote party was having to transcode to 4 Mbps and I was getting original quality.

The first issue was the video was out of sync by 3 seconds. I was three seconds behind the remote party. It doesn’t sound like much, but is difficult to enjoy punchlines to jokes at the same time. We also found it difficult to discuss scenes because we might be on different scenes. Most modern shows switch camera angles every second or two. How much of a time difference does Plex tolerate? I will say I’m used to multiplayer PC games where lag might be measure in 100 milliseconds even played across a couple thousand miles.

The second and third issues were that I would create the “Watch Together” invite and I wouldn’t be dropped into the lobby, but instead the stream would start and then pause right away (issue 2). Shouldn’t we both enter the lobby and the stream starts after we both join?

Next, the other party joined the lobby and then the stream for them would start and play, however my stream would remain paused (issue 3). We tried two different shows and had the same result. The only way I could get us playing at the same time was to fast forward a bit into the stream to force the other party to re-sync with me.

Overall, the feature was enjoyable after the initial headaches of getting things to play together.

I also open to suggestions on how to allow the parties to communicate with each other (most likely by phone) without the audio from the separate streams to be heard on the phones (especially since the audio is out of sync due to the streams being out of sync).

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If the remote user was transcoding on a 4mb stream there’s a good chance their remote streaming quality needs to be increased

They need to do this in their settings on the Roku. The default is 2 to 4mbps on most clients. Have them change it to “original”

The time difference between the two streams varies. Anywhere between 0.5 to 4 seconds. If one person is transcoding and one is not, I’m suspicious about it maybe throwing the timing off a little more than average. It’s never going to be identical as far as the audio goes. You’ll always have a bit of an echo effect

The person who creates the watch together session gets dropped into a pre-play screen to wait. It says the video will start once everybody joins. As soon as the other party clicks on the thumbnail that is considered “joining” and it starts to play for everybody

I have had a stream start for one person and not another but it hasn’t happened more than a couple times and it was fixed by one person leaving and rejoining. I hope that’s not a regular problem for you

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I have the server limited to 4 Mbps due to ISP limited upload connection. The remote Roku is set to 4 Mbps (though I should set it to Original for other reasons).

Yes, I was wondering about the Transcoding vs Direct Play, but I’m assuming Plex has some fancy coding that accounts for that already.

Right, this is what I thought it should do but definitely is not what happened to me on the two different streams.

I’m going to try to do some more testing.

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