Firstly, apologies if this topic has already been discussed. I did search the forum but couldn’t find anything.
My question concerns the performance of the Plex UI on my Xbox One. The issues I’m seeing are as follows:
The film cover artwork rarely loads correctly - the artwork is either not displayed at all or is corrupted.
Response times to user input is slow.
When playing a film, quite often the screen will just go blank and the film never plays.
If I quit the player and reboot the Xbox this seems to help but only briefly.
When I do manage to play a film, it will play fine with no buffering or stuttering etc.
Both the player and the server versions are fully up to date. The Xbox and the server sit on the same gigabit LAN.
By comparison, when I use the Plex Home Theatre on my Macbook over wireless it works like a dream.
I’ve looked at the various settings and my network connections but all appears to be fine. I’m at a loss as to what could be causing the poor performance so would be very grateful for any suggestions from the community.
My apologies … forgot about that. It’s a Windows PC built specifically for running the Plex server although it does have one or two other ‘low-level’ services running on it (E.g. an archiving tool for backing my NAS up to the cloud). Details of the server are given in the screenshot below.
Also forgot to mention that my film library exists on a NAS which also sits on the same LAN as the server and the Xbox.
Have you tried a hard reset of the Xbox One? This involves just holding the power button on the console for ~10 seconds instead of going to through the menus and selecting reboot.
Yes, I have done this a number of times and the experience improves initially but the poor performance issues quickly manifest themselves again afterwards.
Im going to jump and say i have issues with plex on xbox one s. Is this normal for xbox box users. i get these issues and more, time outs, slow input and movies are getting green stuff over them when playing back. Have PS4/SamsungTV/RBP2/3 and the xbox app is just really bad. what going on?
Looks like processor wise, your server should be fine. I’ve switched my server boot drive and Plex library to a SSD (not the media files, just the server database). I’ve found the thumbs load MUCH quicker. I’ve seen a noticeable improvement both on the XboxOne and my iOS devices.
Not saying the XboxOne app isn’t good or bad. Just saying, I’ve had better luck since upgrading my server (from NAS, and then adding the SSD).
I built the server myself and the whole system is solid-state and whilst I appreciate what you’re saying I wouldn’t have expected this to have made much difference tbh.
I’m still a bit stumped by this performance on the XboxOne. As I say, performance is slick on other devices (macbook, ipad, other mobile devices, etc.) which suggests that the server itself is capable. The problem does point to the Xbox app itself or the network connection between the Xbox and server but that’s fine as far as I can tell.
Okay so I think I’ve found the cause of the problem.
Firstly, the network link between my core switch (a 24 port Cisco 2970G) and the location of my Xbox was auto-negotiating to only 100mbps. I would not have expected this to be a big problem for the UI and standard def playback although would cause hi def playback to buffer. Resolved this one simply with a new cable on the link.
The other thing I remembered was that IPv6 can cause problems on Windows 7 servers sitting on IPv4 networks. I disabled IPv6 completely (this is enabled by default) on my Plex server and this was the golden bullet. Plex performance on the Xbox One has vastly improved since doing this … it’s actually usable now which is great.
@smellygav said:
Okay so I think I’ve found the cause of the problem.
Awesome, thanks for coming back and letting everyone know what the issue was! I marked your solution as the answer so anyone that comes across this has a reference of things to check out.
Hi, thanks for this info, it has certainly improved on my xbox too after disabling IPv6 in my network settings. However I have some 4K content, mainly blu-ray which I have up scaled via dvd fab, these will play for a few seconds (really good picture quality playing smoothly) then freeze for a few seconds and then start again, I do not have this issue on any other platform I play Plex from, am I asking too much from my xbox for this!
