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 haven’t had issues this bad, but Plex has been buffering a lot more lately. If moving to Jellyfin didn’t involve new hardware for me, I would have already jumped ship.
Why would Jellyfin need new hardware?
I run plex on a synology nas whose kernel is too out of date for hardware accelerated transcoding in Jellyfin.
Can’t you just use a newer kernel?
Wouldn’t this also be a significant security issue?
No, diskstation runs a significantly modified 2.4 kernel. They say they backport CSM mitigations/fixes into their kernel, but community pressure is growing by the year for them to update.
Holy shit, I remember being excited for 2.4 because of iptables. That was over twenty years ago.
Have you considered just installing Debian?
I recently went from synology video to Jellyfin cause the last update on synology dont support the video hosting anymore. I run a syn 920. And its sweet only issue so far have been able to use jellyfin to cast to Chromecast.
It’s been about a year since I tried it, so it’s probably worth another. Back then it did OK if I was doing straight passthrough (though CPU load was noticeably higher) but I got a lot of buffering when I’d try to have it transcode anything.
I host quite a few things on it (via docker) so the 920 is starting to show its load. I suspect that and the lack of hardware acceleration are the source of my issues.
I should probably mention i did upgrade it past the supported kernel and doubled the ram, i only host pihole and bitwarden and jellyfin. But docker makes things so much easier and fun.
Can you elaborate on the Plex issues as of late? One of the guys I share my instance with has reported a lot of buffering that I haven’t been able to reproduce.
Sudden buffering followed by a very long load time before it can get going again. Lowering the resolution resolves it for me.
What I’m seeing only on certain files though. And those files will always buffer again at the same point in playback. But it happens on things I watched without issue prior to my last update. So I suspect it’s a problem with a specific codec, but I haven’t taken the time to validate my hunch.
It shouldn’t be buffering at all if you’re direct playing.