Probably the largest issues I have with Plex right now are long standing issues with the web client: An abysmally small client buffer size, and players not being able to be paused for over something like a couple minutes without having to stop playback and restart, else all that’ll play is what was remaining in the local client buffer.
There are plenty of other issues, as can be seen in the forums here and discussions elsewhere and while I do appreciate the few fixes and enhancements to local media library management and playback we see come down the pipe from time to time, I need to be honest. There is no acceptable excuse for these kinds of issues to have dragged on for the many years they have, other than the simple fact that what once was the core business of Plex is now its red-headed step-child. I no more expect these issues to be resolved than I expect to win the jackpot in a lottery.
I’ve not experienced small client buffer size, seems like the buffer size on browser is way more than other clients like roku. I think the pause issue is happening less so nowadays, but it is still happening. I agree it’s very annoying. Sometimes plex web would auto correct and reload the stream if it’s “lost” the connection, and sometimes it would just show the loading circle forever.
The buffer size on the web client shows its head more when directly streaming media with a variable bitrate when on a slowish wireless connection (hotels, marginal LTE, etc.) When hitting a high action scene, the local buffer will be exhausted while the stream isn’t able to fill it fast enough. Issues like this are resolved with larger local buffers. Currently you need to set the client to stream at a very low quality to work around the issue.
The pause issue seems to only happen on the web client.
I have seen this too, and it is not a slow connection, just an unstable one, for an example: the connection wildly fluctuates between 4k/s and 50MB/s with the average over an hour around the 25MB/s mark which would be fine for watching content if the buffer allowed it.
This is a pretty common thing to see in shared networking environments like Hotels or other Public WiFi.
No, it’s due to too small of a buffer. Inconsistent network speeds are common and solved with larger client buffers when we don’t care about things like latency.
You think Plex can just add more memory space to the device? lol. Next thing you’re gonna tell me is you can just download more memory to make your computer faster.
The web client could easily be adjusted for larger client buffers, and in web streaming large buffers are very common. Since the web client runs on PCs, a large buffer is not an issue – and since the web client is commonly used when traveling and remotely accessing one’s Plex library, having a larger client buffer is a must.
Just image the complaints from around the globe youtube user would have if its client buffer was reduced to the size Plex uses.
Indeed. There’s a tendency to forget how relatively “bad” many users’ connections are globally. For instance, it’s common in some places for a community to all share a single satellite link. So you have bandwidth constraints and high latency working against anything a user might want to do.
Some years ago, I co-hosted a lab session at a mobile conference. One of the things I did was spin up a WiFi network which imitated an average-at-that-time experience for an Indian mobile phone user in a large city. As all of the attendees were from North America and Europe, they found it frustratingly unusable and found their apps riddled with errors and misbehaviors.
It’s very easy to optimize for the common case. It’s much more challenging to optimize for both the common case and the worst case, simultaneously. And, sadly, doing it well requires a distributed engineering force the size of e.g. Google’s.
That said, I’d love to see Plex Web be more adaptive. I keep my Plex server in a datacenter for a number of reasons (connectivity and reliability, very near the top of the list). That alone helps me mitigate some of the issues when traveling (I’m often on LTE, 4G, or public WiFi). But not everyone has the luxury of (or knowledge for) tuning their TCP stacks for their particular access patterns and loads. And this is where Plex could do a better job of making their defaults work better.
You’re not helping. I’m a software engineer, I understand fully what it would take and the limitations of what’s being asked, and also understand that it not a big ask at all.
Let’s just say that it’s easy to develop for the cases it’s easier to test and get feedback for. It’s the cases that make up what’s called “the long tail” that are difficult and that we’re asking for them to address better. Shrinking that tail improves the experience of everyone along it.
If you need it spelled out, I’m asking Plex to take the time to wrap their heads around MediaSource and SourceBuffer and how to use them to their fullest extent – or maybe grab one of the many libraries that will do much of the work for them including fallbacks for old iOS devices if they feel the need to keep them supported in the web client.
Yes. Streaming video is easy when you don’t have to worry about the reality wireless connections. That last 10% takes a bit of effort, but makes a much more stable result for everyone else in the process.
Plex might not be able to increase the memory, but it should be able to use more disk.
I haven’t checked recently but back in the day, the default disk cache limit for IE was 10% of the disk, if it is still something like this than that should be heaps for playback LOL, heck it would be enough to cache an entire feature length movie multiple times on most current PCs/Laptops.
Just use the desktop player FFS. You can pre-buffer half an episode on it.
You guys don’t understand that the Plex cache buffer is set to work within device limitations and restrictions. Like I said initially, your problems are slow and bad connections, not the pre-cache buffer. There’s nothing Plex can do if the device doesn’t have enough cache buffer (HARDWARE) in the device to compensate for the crappy internet connection.
Maybe you should lower the quality of the stream so that more time can fit in the cache, and you won’t get buffering issues… Trying to play a high bitrate stream when it’s clear that either the device or the connection can’t handle it is a waste of time when you can just lower the quality.
The desktop app is not available for every operating system that people use. Interested third-party developers, like me, don’t have all the right knowledge to make it happen as Plex keeps their secret sauce close to their chest and we don’t all have enough time available to fully reverse engineer it.
Plex Web runs fine on ArcaOS, for instance, but there is likely to never be an official app. Likewise, there are a fair number of TVs with suitable web browsers which do not have Plex apps available.
The complaint is that the Web cache does not adapt to “device limitations and restrictions”. It seems to just use a static value that does not reflect the reality of many devices. Transcoding to 480p on a machine with an underutilized fiber WAN connection and with almost no CPU or memory usage is a waste of server resources just because the client does not adapt to the realities of the system it is running on.
Surely you’re not saying that a recent CPU and 64 gigs of RAM is considered insufficient to stream a movie in your world?
