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…
similar issues with other titles or just that one file?
I just watched an episode of a different show, and while it didn’t completely crash, it still stuttered and paused randomly.
I know it’s not the server itself, as it’s handling more intense tasks regularly with no issues, and the network works on every other device too. I stream higher quality with higher bit rates to the fire stick regularly too, with no issues.
It could be the specific audio or video codecs of those files causing the stuttering issues. I’ve always seemed to have trouble with EAC3 audio even after 6 or 7 years and a multitude of updates and different hardware.
That’s a good point. I’ll check the file and see if there’s anything unusual compared to the others 🙂
Just solved an issue with transcoding where I had to delete the codec. It redownloads on server launch so was an easy fix.