I put on an episode of a show I’m watching, and about ten minutes into it, I missed something on screen, so pressed the skip back button on my remote. The spinning loading circle came up, but stayed for a while, and the episode froze at the point where I’d pressed the button.
No problem I thought, I haven’t used Plex for a while, it might just need a little kick. I restarted my fire stick, and restarted the Plex server, just in case. A few minutes later, I didn’t catch what a character said, so I tried skipping back again. Plex crashed again. Another set of restarts and we’re watching again.
About 15 minutes later, the episode just freezes. No error message or warning, just a frozen screen. I gave it a minute and pressed play, and Plex crashed back to the episode selection screen. Pressing play worked again for a few minutes, until I got an error on screen telling me that my network is too slow for the video. It’s a less than 1080p video streaming at 10 Mbps over a gigabit connection. This time, reopening the video took me back to the point of the last issue.
So much for relaxing in front of the TV…
I just checked the episode through Plex, and it’s direct playing. I didn’t get any stuttering while I was skipping around though. I think it’s Plex itself, either the server or the player.
My physical server is a bit old now, it’s a Haswell i5, so if this was an ultra HD bluray rip I could understand it, but it’s been playing HD and 4k videos without issues for years now.
Direct play should take very little CPU regardless of media quality, I can have multiple 4K streams going and my utilization is <10% on a Cameron J3455 (4c/4t Apollo Lake). When you’re direct playing it’s more a factor of HDD/network speed and the client than anything server side.
Is it just that one file?
Nope. It does it with random videos every now and then, and with no obvious pattern. It’s not lasting for a set amount of time either, so it’s not like something’s running in the background and slowing it down for a while.
In the past I’ve shut down everything I can think of on the server to stop something from taking priority, but it still happens. On those occasions it’s happened for half an hour or more, but other times it might last for a few minutes, or just affect one episode.