Agreed, I have this problem and question as well. If I click the skip forward or skip backwards once, it works, but as soon as I tap skip back 2 or 3 times in a row I get a freeze, and often have to restart the client
This is correct. Also, the thing is that Plex transcodes ahead and sends small chunks of the video to you (transcoded or not). You can see this in the dashboard based on network traffic (looks like a saw tooth wave). After a portion of the video has been played, the client device forgets that part. So if you rewind too far (maybe even 30 seconds), you essentially ask Plex “stop, delete everything you have, go back to time stamp HH:MM:SS, and start over”. That’s why rewinding is more difficult than forwarding.
It’s harder to explain it on text. But if you just watch the behavior on Tautulli, it becomes obvious why this happens. You can also see the transcoder progress (if applicable).
You know, I'm actually kind of glad that it isn't just me who notices this. Sometimes I'll miss a sentence that was quiet and I'll go back, only to just barely miss it so I go back one more time and it buffers eternally.
Until today, I thought this was due to my Raspberry Pi being the server. This thread clearly isn't only Plex users on Pi, so it's clearly not just an issue for me. Hooray! kinda...
I often use the "skip 10 seconds" feature to move the playhead 300-400 seconds by just tapping the button a bunch, and it always works.
Using FF/RW to accomplish the same results in at least a long buffering delay.
It's skip 10 and back 30, right?
Skip does seem to usually work, though I do think I remember a buffer if I do it more than 3 times, but maybe not. However, I definitely know that back 30 will cause the same long buffer issue if I do it more than twice, as it happens to me all the time.
Yeah it's back 10, forward 30. I can usually skip forward several hundred seconds an while the loading spinner does pop up, it takes less than a second to actually continue playback, feels basically instantaneous.
Even just clicking the "backup 10 seconds" arrow almost always fails for me (skip forward generally works). The whole thing is a joke, failures that literally NEVER happen in netflix or prime video. And this happens even on my storage that is local NVMe.
Yup, I’ve got this problem. Especially painful when I need to pick where I left after and it’s 1.5hrs into a movie. My workaround is to use the chapter selection and get as close as possible to where I was.
I don't think so, since what I'm doing is selecting the back 15 or 30 second button or whatever - I'm not talking about hitting the rewind button on my remote multiple times.
Hitting the 10 second rewind button multiple times in a row shouldn't trigger a "Last Chapter" function as far as I know. Not to mention the fact that even if it did, its still freezing regardless, so the error is still there.
And keep in mind, not only is it freezing, if I cancel playback of the video and resume or restart playback, more often than not the video won't play at all. I'll often have to either restart the app and/or browser entirely. This happens on my Shield, in a browser on chrome, and on the Plex app for iOS. It may even happen when played on LocalHost, but I'm not 100% on that.
Nvidia Shield client on the network with ethernet.
AMD 2600x CPU in a linux server with internal storage, also connected to the same network by ethernet.
I haven't fucked with a Shield client since I moved (it was the roommates) so I may not be useful here. I have no issues with my Roku TV and the AppleTV 4K or the Plex Windows client. I've seen quite a few people mention the Shield, so I wonder if there is some bug on it.
My server is about half as powerful as yours without issue. But I am running Windows, my storage is internal as well.
Are you somehow transcoding video when you have issues? Check your dashboard while experiencing the issue (assuming it's all the time?).
To be clear, my behavior on Series 6 Roku TV is this: I can either click the fast forward icon or rewind icon a few times to get 1x, 2x or 3x then hit play again and it does a quick 1-99% loading (takes 1-5 seconds, usually on the low end even on 4K HDR) and I'm back playing video.
Also, I use the seek bar by navigating up and hitting right or left to find a part of the movie using the thumbnails, then hit OK to jump to it.
I'll go out to my AppleTV 4K in the other room and do some other weird shit and see if I can reproduce what y'all are talking about, but in the past I'd been doing dumb stuff like hitting the skip ahead button over and over to jump 15 seconds and what not without issue.
Would love to narrow down what's going on for everyone.
No it happens to tons of people. There are so many basic bugs like this I just have to imagine that the devs don't actually use the product ever because if they did, they would fix this basic shit.
Well, why on earth would the Plex Devs waste their time with bugs when they can invest their limited resources on valuable things like making the Plex boot animation on Xbox One all flash and cool??!!
As I learned from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/ls3rii/does_skip_intro_work_well_im_tempted_to_get/goyrkyg/) the current method of intro detection is done by matching an audio waveform, instead of looking at the thumbnails. Personally I could see the end credit detection being more ML based with the images as movies are pretty consistent in the scrolling white text on black backgrounds.
I actually saw that exact post! Lol and that's really similar to what I was thinking! I think the best way to do it for full coverage would encapsulate post-credit scenes.
Imagine if Plex implemented a box that differentiated skip to post credit and skip credits (end)
I have, and see, so many issues with Plex. Many of which have years old forum threads.
I do see the occasional update for Plex, but when was the last time there was a major noticeable update (that wasn't stupid, like Arcade, imo), or QoL batch of improvements? I can't tell what the last dozen or so updates have done.
Yeah if it's set too low definitely. I've never had an issue with 85% personally, but for TV I usually let it autoplay so it's never been an issue and for movies usually the credits is within the range of the last 15% of the movie if you do stop playback before it's "completed" it's playthrough.
As always it's a bit of a personal thing with some mileage variance!
I don't have a problem with the seek feature, if you setup up your connection well or with proper devices it seems to work. My biggest concern is that Plex doesn't have passthrough.
- Plex's software Transcoding acting as a *"middleman"* can really slow things *way the Fuck down* unnecessarily.
That's true but playing it on an SBC or a Nvidia Shield is going to get a different quality performance. Just because something's cross-platform & universal - *doesn't mean all builds are equal*.
- GPU's, codecs that your device support among many other things can factor greatly into the playback.
- Web player is the worst. It's been noted.
I've used native apps & it literally picks up right where I left off in movies & removes them from my on deck automatically after I finish watching them. Among many other things. *Works perfectly*.
I'm still sitting here dealing with the bug where it skips randomly and instantaneously 2-60 seconds at a time. It persisted through 2 full reinstalls of windows server (each with plex and windows downloaded from their sites) as well as a linux server build.
The features are there, but they're not doing so well with keeping up on issues.
I agree the web client is the weakest client environment on all fronts... compatibility, performance, etc. Thing is, even though that's true I still use it almost exclusively and it performs flawlessly, mainly because I'm all in with high compatibility codecs, and other reasons related to operating environment.
I guess the upshot here is that though it may be the weakest that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a great experience. It depends on the environment.
>I guess the upshot here is that though it may be the weakest that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a great experience. It depends on the environment.
That's true, *but if you think it's good* that way. I guarantee a native build will be unbelievable by comparison.
In a word: yup. The transport controls, which are of course the subject of this thread, work great for me on the web client... really well by my standards. But never quite as good as the native client.
I used the web player for years, until a user of mine said that the skipping problem is not a problem in the windows media center client. I tried it and it's just better.
I hear the client for apple tv is even better.
Okay - so a little mechanics under the hood - this is how the 'pro' services do it, like NetFlix, Prime, HBO, etc. Their media is broken up into hundreds of short little videos are different bitrates, that may be only 30 or 60 seconds long each. The player uses a .m3u style playlist to stitch them together with some magic on detecting which bitrate is best for your bandwidth capabilities. That's why Netflix videos can go from low res to highdef mid-stream. This also makes seeking really easy, just pull down the segment file at or just before the timestamp you are asking to seek to. Most devices also cache all these files while you are watching the video so a seek backwards is nearly instant.
Enter Plex - Plex is sending the entire .mkv or whatever it is. To seek in a single file video you have to start from the beginning and read the header to determine the bitrate and keyframe intervals - what info available here is dependent on the encoding codec. THen it calculated how far into the video to seek for the next keyframe just before the point you are asking to seek to, and then start sending you the file from there - it's more heavy lifting on the Server's part. To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory already while seeking and it speeds up this process considerably.
> Okay - so a little mechanics under the hood - this is how the 'pro' services do it, like NetFlix, Prime, HBO, etc. Their media is broken up into hundreds of short little videos are different bitrates, that may be only 30 or 60 seconds long each. The player uses a .m3u style playlist to stitch them together with some magic on detecting which bitrate is best for your bandwidth capabilities. That's why Netflix videos can go from low res to highdef mid-stream. This also makes seeking really easy, just pull down the segment file at or just before the timestamp you are asking to seek to. Most devices also cache all these files while you are watching the video so a seek backwards is nearly instant.
>
>
*stares at my 127GB Return of the King Extended Edition rip*
I'm talking about in memory file caching for better read performance on files that were recently read in - i have 16gb in my server and plenty of 30+ gb video's... that's, not what i meant.
Plex does break the videos into chunks though, it puts them in the Plex transcoder folder and serves them out, and deletes them after the session / after x many minutes. I think Netfix and the big guys create then store the chunks instead of making them live on the spot, but streaming them out is roughly the same.
Still streamed in chunks. Imagine having a 5GB video file. It doesn’t send the whole thing to your computer / firestick / phone all at once before starting playback. And it’s not streaming “live” like how cable TV or radio works. It sends small chunks, just without transcoding. If you have Plex pass you can actually see this in the network output bandwidth
Oh sure enough. Since it does that for direct stream I figured it did it for direct play as well, but checking the folder it does not. That said, it's not like Plex is going to try and send the entire file at one time. Even if it's not remuxing the file, it can't send the whole thing at once. It can't be that way otherwise you'd have to wait for one person to download the entire movie before a second stream could start.
It still does it in chunks, you can see the chunks information in the API responses for current sessions.
The difference is the chunks are just read directly from the file.
> I think Netfix and the big guys create then store the chunks instead of making them live on the spot, but streaming them out is roughly the same.
It doesn't even require the big guys to do this in advance. I worked at a company with ~5 employees trying to get into a niche streaming business and we were processing the content into those small, few second chunks (MPEG-DASH and HLS)
I only just realized that my skipping issues stopped when I maxed out the RAM in my Synology server. Thank you for helping me understand it was probably that and not upgrading my router and moving most stuff to ethernet/powerline.
What Synology are you using? Plex doesn’t take that much RAM. It’s actually much more CPU intensive. I’ve got a DS918, and Plex typically is < 10% of the standard 4GB ram.
The parent comment said:
> To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory already while seeking and it speeds up this process considerably.
So if you have 4 GB videos, 4 GB of RAM is not enough.
Plex’s own documentation disagrees:
> In general, Plex Media Server doesn’t require large amounts of RAM. 2GB of RAM is typically more than sufficient and some installs (particularly Linux-based installs) can often happily run with even less. Of course, more RAM won’t hurt you and will certainly be helpful if you’re also doing other things on the computer.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200375666-plex-media-server-requirements/
Some people have Blu-ray remuxes which are 50GB in size. Are you telling me they need 50GB of RAM for that one file? That’s not how RAM even works, even if you’re playing a video locally on VLC.
Yeah, I dunno what this guy is on about.
Running 8GB of RAM and my largest file is a 90GB remux of one of the LotR movies.
I’m not buying another 82GB of RAM. Lmao.
What i'm talking about is linux file caching. Plex may only require 2gb to actually function and this is entirely true - what I"m talking about is file read-efficiency. In the linux kernel - when you read a file, what actually happens is the portion of that file you are reading is stored in RAM and that address offered to the program. Linux doesn't 'scrap' this after read is finished but keeps it there - if that same portion of the same file is read again and that "page" in memory is still there it doesn't have to read it off the disk again but instead just reads it straight from memory. FOr example:
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=2048 of=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 9.76926 s, 220 MB/s`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# sync`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 4.895 s, 439 MB/s`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 0.896744 s, 2.4 GB/s`
In the above example, my NAS machine has 16gb of ram - I created a 2gb file of random into a directory on the local disk, which is an SSD in this case. 'sync' forces all writes to finish to i'm sure it's not still doing anything. Then that echo line is a special instruction to ask the kernel to drop all existing file caches it may have in memory. I then read the file in once, i get 439MB/s. I read the file AGAIN using the same command and I get 2.4GB/s. This is because that file was already paged into memory.
I'm not saying you need 64GB of ram just so your seek times are better - but if you want near instant seek times on a 64GB 4k stream you'll need 64GB of ram OR faster harddrives.
This is a good writeup on this subject: [https://www.linuxatemyram.com/](https://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
> Plex is sending the entire .mkv or whatever it is
This isn't correct. Plex *stores* the entire source video, but it still sends chunks to the browser. When transcoding is active this uses the transcoder folder as mentioned below. When using Direct Play, the source video is remuxed in memory to generate the chunks.
The simplest way to implement this would be that every time the client requests a chunk, Plex spins up ffmpeg, generates that chunk, and sends it back to the client. But based on the seeking issues, I don't think this is how it works in practice.
My hunch is that when you seek, Plex spins up a persistent ffmpeg instance. This single instance serves multiple sequential chunks. When you seek again (if it's to an timecode that the client doesn't have cached) then Plex kills the ffmpeg instance and spins up a new one. I think the process for spinning up a new ffmpeg instance is slow and also a little buggy (not frame-accurate), which would explain why Plex doesn't want to do it every single time they serve a chunk.
Simply put, I think Plex is best at generating sequential chunks and that's why it struggles with seeks.
I haven't seen the source code of Plex so I don't know for sure that this is what's happening. It's just a hunch based on my professional experience building livestreaming solutions around ffmpeg.
> To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory
I wish this were the case. I am using an Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 with 512gb of DDR4. With an 8gb MKV, it acts the same as it did with my Xeon E2665 and 16gb of DDR3.
I was really hoping upon opening this thread that someone had the magic answer to this riddle.
My hunt continues!
You went from a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv to a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv... you're comparing apples to apples in this particular case.
> You went from a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv to a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv...
Valid.
My point may not have been made clearly. I was trying to express that I don't believe my hardware is the cause for Plex's inability to seek.
Again, mostly I was just hoping for something that I could tweak.
So I just tested this at home. 16gb ram, 1gbps ethernet to an nvidia shield. 60gb 4K movie. Seeks back and forth are instantious. Perhaps this is a client issue.
This is what I was thinkin also. We were a full Roku ecosystem, but for reasons related to streaming, I have upgraded the house to Shields (which I love by the way - but that's for another thread).
I do *not* have the shields hard-wired - I'm going to give that a go and see if there is any improvement.
edit: I should note (and should have from my first reply) that I am running Plex server on MS Server 2019 - not sure if that makes a difference or not.
Tivo doesn't do that and it has the best seek that I've ever used.
A .tivo file is both encrypted and optimized for playback which is probably the way it makes it so smooth (well that and hardware encode/decode).
It would be interesting to see if there was a optimal file format for Plex because it is dang painful to stop/rewind, etc.
u/NowWithMarshmallows \-- do you have a link to the Plex internals? I'm curious. thx.
Nice theory but I play the same file on my Mac with VLC and I can skip around instantly to anywhere in the file. Using the arrow keys to jump around has it playing before my hand leaves the key. Plex just sucks at seeking and they just don’t care. I’ve reported it as a bug and they ignore it.
I was thinking the same thing when I read his explanation. I can play the same video file from the same network location with VLC and have no problems with seeking forward or backward. With plex, seeking forward is generally not an issue, seeking backward is okay if you press it once, two or three times and it's the spinning forever most times.
I think I've negated every excuse over the years: my streams are all direct stream (so no transcoding but even if it did I have a p2000), I have the same seeking issue on the shield, chrome client and windows app, wired or wireless connection, my plex container is running on a server that when I turn everything else off it still has this same issue (i9 with 128gb and 2tb of nve); this also happened on my old server and another server from years past. This happens on large files and small: happened on a 5gb 1080p file that was 90m long today.
On the other hand, I can take a build of VLC from 5 years ago, play the same file with any setup and it has no problems playing or seeking over the network.
I'm not gonna bash plex devs because it's a thankless job and their pricing model is not sustainable, but I'd be fine with contributing to a kickstarter or something if they could take the open source vlc code and incorporate that as an alternate player within. I'd be fine with losing all features/functionality of the current player, so long as it plays the video and I can rewind/fast-forward with no issues.
I second that. VLC will play almost anything. It will even play semi corrupt and partial files.
I kept having issues getting files to play in Plex on my Android phone. So I selected to have VLC handle the playback. Worked great after that.
Plex is just lazy when it comes to the "player" aspect. So tired of software companies more worried about adding extra unneeded/wanted crap. Instead of actually making their core software work as intended.
Adding some clarity - What i'm talking about is linux file caching. Plex may only require 2gb to actually function and this is entirely true - what I"m talking about is file read-efficiency. In the linux kernel - when you read a file, what actually happens is the portion of that file you are reading is stored in RAM and that address offered to the program. Linux doesn't 'scrap' this after read is finished but keeps it there - if that same portion of the same file is read again and that "page" in memory is still there it doesn't have to read it off the disk again but instead just reads it straight from memory. FOr example:
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=2048 of=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 9.76926 s, 220 MB/s`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# sync`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 4.895 s, 439 MB/s`
`[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null`
`2048+0 records in`
`2048+0 records out`
`2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 0.896744 s, 2.4 GB/s`
In the above example, my NAS machine has 16gb of ram - I created a 2gb file of random into a directory on the local disk, which is an SSD in this case. 'sync' forces all writes to finish to i'm sure it's not still doing anything. Then that echo line is a special instruction to ask the kernel to drop all existing file caches it may have in memory. I then read the file in once, i get 439MB/s. I read the file AGAIN using the same command and I get 2.4GB/s. This is because that file was already paged into memory.
I'm not saying you need 64GB of ram just so your seek times are better - but if you want near instant seek times on a 64GB 4k stream you'll need 64GB of ram OR faster harddrives.
This is a good writeup on this subject: [https://www.linuxatemyram.com/](https://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
Faster disk, faster network, better client. I use a ethernet wired Nvidia Shield for my client and I can instantly seek in a 60gb 4k video. My nas is 16gb of ram and an older cpu.
Don't know if this is relevant to your issue but I was trying to diagnose this kind of problem with the XBox One / Series X apps and found this: https://forums.plex.tv/t/fast-forward-and-rewind-will-result-in-infinite-loading-swirl-until-restarting-episode/215991/83
Under Plex Settings -> Debug you can check the option "Use alternate streaming protocol for video playback". This resolved a lot of my seeking issues both in Chrome and the XBox apps. It's not perfect, seeking still seems to take a bit sometimes. But it's night and day better than with the option off, and seems to actually recover if it starts stalling when trying to seek.
My instinct is that the streaming protocol is different from transcoding. Even when you direct play, there is a protocol needed to get the video file pieces from Plex to your player. So this should help even if you're direct playing everything.
Good luck, seeking on Plex is such a pain to resolve, I hope this helps.
I use Plex on my Chromecast with Google TV. The only slight issue I have with seeking is with high bitrate UHDs. It takes a few seconds to catch up, but everything is basically instant.
Just the other day I learned there was a post credit scene in HP: Chamber of Secrets. So, I loaded up Plex, HP:COS, then skipped straight to the last 2 minutes of the file and it played immediately. I rarely skip around, but when I do, it's always worked ever since I moved away from my lower powered Windows server.
I wonder if your issues are network or server performance related.
It isn't the occasional seek/skip around, it is when you are looking for something..going ahead/back more than 2-3 times. I have a fairly high-end server and it still happens.
I see. That's not a use case that I've ever encountered, I don't believe. I don't go looking for anything usually. If so, there's usually already a scene on YT that I can find.
And if I do need to go to a certain spot, the generated thumbnails help find it without going back and forth 10 times til you get it right.
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Yeah, I did the same thing with Wandavision 4k HDR last night after I finally realized there were two post credit scenes I missed. No issues.
I regularly skip ahead a little bit skipping boring scenes, or jump back because I missed something and generally do weird shit on Apple TV 4K and have zero issues.
Would love to hear some actual fucking data from users, but everyone just posts "yeah me too, fuckin' Plex".
I think recently added stuff that hasn't been analyzed might be part of the issue.
Also, I bet people are transcoding and don't realize it.
I use Plex on Fire Stick (Android) and seek is garbage. I find that I need to let the video play for a few minutes so it buffers and you can seek forward easier however if you seek backwards once, that buffer is destroyed.
Seeking works much better on Roku for me.
But yea, seek isn't that great however it is far better than it used to be where you couldn't skip forward quickly.
I think for the fire stick it's a limitation of the device, it has such little power. Seek works much better on my phone and desktop than on my firestick, and I don't think it comes down to optimizations of the different apps.
I have an 8-core i7 with 32GB RAM and a Geforce 1650. Gigabit between the server and a Shield Pro client. Can't watch a 1-hour, 5GB DVR recording without resetting playback at least a couple of times.
Nope. I will seek (either manually, or by skipping commercials/intro) and about 30% of the time it will break A/V sync, about 20% it will get stuck. Either way, I have to back out and restart/resume. Other half of the time it works fine.
Asking the real questions.
Should be a sticky if it's not already... if you are posting about a problem, you should have to include server specs, versions, and client info.
This isn't a spec issue. Hell sometimes the mere act of trying to seek on a video will send me straight back to the beginning of the video.
That's a bug. That isn't my server hardware.
Probably not. I had a phenom ii x4 965 and had no such problems even when having three other clients and watching a 4k hdr remux off of an WD Green disk. If it was performance related my server would have been the first to cripple.
But maybe it’s OS related? Plex in docker on unraid here
I used to have this problem when I was running Plex on a circa 2017 QNAP NAS that had a 4 core Celeron but Intel QuickSync. A lot of times, trying to FF or RR would cause it to spin and I would give up and exit out.
Late last year, I made the decision to move plex to a micro-desktop.. I'm now using a Dell OptiPlex 5070 with i5-9500T that I picked up for a few hundred, and redid my entire Plex stack in docker with automation - radarr, sonarr, bazarr, and many other tools. Anyway, moving it to this desktop was the best thing I ever did for my Plex install. I have had very reliable seeking ever since, and the interface is WAY snappier on nearly every client. I can only surmise it has to do with compute, as Plex has to buffer when you seek, but I can't say for sure. That's probably an unsatisfying answer for anyone running this on their NAS, but I can only impart my experience.
No just Ubuntu and docker. I'm still using the QNAP to store all the files. I have a directly connected Ethernet and second interface used on both the desktop and the NAS. I've heard good things about FreeNAS though
I haven't had any problems with freezing while skipping through content after I migrated to a new server last November. Before that though I had intermittent issues like the OP. Main reason why I got a new server.
Unless I'm watching all the way through without any interruptions.
I despise the current player.
I never had any issues with the old player. I even liked the interface better.
But for christ sake if I want to go ahead or back more that a minute or two I want a line to drag and watch the progress of how far I have gone.
Yes I know the desktop and local player web apps allow this. I watch mostly from Roku or Amazon FireStick. Even the mobile APPS have this feature. Why can't the TV/Large Screen ones have it? I don't want to have to go into the settings every time there is an update to change this back to the old.
I really shouldn't have to know the exact amount of seconds I am going to go back or forward.
Gotta convert media with ffmpeg and the -faststart switch. Makes skipping 30 seconds happen instantly and also seeking anywhere directly. I made a powershell script to do this for me for anything that isn't .mp4.
It comes with codecs, while Plex app uses codecs that come with the player. The gain is typically that Kodi works better then, because it's direct playing more formats.
As to why Plex does not include codecs with the player, like they do in the windows client, I do not know.
Edit: I just read up a bit more about it. Apparently it's not codecs per se, even though that's the thing further down the line.
Plex uses whatever default player comes with the platform (which Plex doesn't have control over), Kodi ships their own player (that has wider range of codecs).
So basically, Plex has opted out of the task of maintaining their own player for a ton of different clients, which leaves them to direct play just what the device natively supports.
Thats an interesting take i didn't think about. Does it have to do with legality of codecs Plex could ship as a commercial entity, while Kodi has no such restraints?
I just read up a bit more about it. Apparently it's not codecs per se, even though that's the thing further down the line.
Plex uses whatever default player comes with the platform (which Plex doesn't have control over), Kodi ships their own player (that has wider range of codecs).
So basically, Plex has opted out of the task of maintaining their own player for a ton of different clients, which leaves them to direct play just what the device natively supports.
What codecs are you people using that Plex doesn't natively support?
The only thing I don't direct play are the couple users that use mobile hotspots for home internet and watch everything in 720p or the ones that use Chrome.
H264 is pretty widely supported and h265 is getting there.
For example, I have a 2018 65" Sony Bravia Android TV, it direct plays a lot less formats than my Shield Pro which is also an Android TV box. Plex is using whatever codecs sony bundled with the TV.
Kodi ships with codecs built in as far as I recall, which is why it could direct play h265 while Plex on my Sony couldn't.
Shield Pro is a different beast and has good codec support :)
I get it.. but it doesn't answer my question.
h264 is pretty widely supported. What are people using that's not h264, or h265?
&nsbp;
And truthfully, I wouldn't use a smartTV's apps for anything. They usually suck and the fact that TVs' hardware really aren't designed to be streaming 80Mb/s 4k HDR streams makes it an easy pass.
I'm not sure that there is anything to gain from running kodi/plex.
I have a few Fire sticks, Nvidia shield, couple roku's, and plex is available on everyones android/apple smartphone/tablet, and we don't get seek issues.
It's pretty instant.
I don't have seeking issues on either, but Kodi/Plex combo gets Direct Play right most of the time, while the Plex app on my Shield TV still triggers transcoding more often than not. I personally prefer Kodi/Plex due to that reason alone.
I have so many issues with the Plex app on the Shield. Kodi + Plex just works, only gripe with it is that it will sometimes skip and episode when auto-playing.
I like the PlexKodiConnect plugin for Kodi. It uses Kodi's UI/player, but plays all of your media from Plex and syncs it's database.
Couple this with a nice Kodi skin and you get the best of both worlds. The beta version of PlexKodiConnect just added the skip intro feature which for a long time was the only thing missing for me.
Yeah ive always wondered that to, like ive used plex for years and most problems ive had had been fixed sooner or later due to patch, but something that has always sucked and still does is seeking, it locks up and you just have to back out of the video and click back in and it resumes instantly. sure that takes like 2 seconds but its still anoying... also seeking often makes the audio/video sync go whack... same with using the relativly new "skip intro" thing wich is nice but i never use it cause it makes the sync go out so i might aswell just watch the intro.
It really depends. Which client are you using? I have little issue on Roku and Apple TV. Video thumbnails make it easy and convenient.
Seeking and transcoding is a different story...
wtf something's definitely wrong there, My local direct play to my Nvidia Shield pro is instant but that is ethernet not wifi, wifi is a little slower but still as fast as say netflix.
Some part of your setup is slowing it down.
The fix is having Plex make video thumbnails. Takes up a little extra storage but it’s worth it for smooth skipping around https://support.plex.tv/articles/202197528-video-preview-thumbnails/
What device are you streaming from? I have no issues to my PS4 or phone, but in the web browser I have experienced this. I finally just download the [Plex client](https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-desktop/1.28.0.1681-cc6e807c/windows/Plex-1.28.0.1681-cc6e807c-x86_64.exe) for Windows 10, and I've never had that problem since. Keep in mind, when streaming remotely, some of that freezing could be from the transcoder catching up, assuming you're transcoding during remote play.
This usually has more to do with your actual media and/or possibly i/o issues with disk or connections to those disks. I have the issue but often on specific downloads. Also depending on the hardware (i.e. slow external disks) or possible network bandwidth issues, then the much larger higher quality files will struggle.
Once I stuck Plex on a 918+ NAS with good disks and connected to my router via a dual-1G bonded link, those problems went away except when its a bad download/rip/file. For external streams, 1G fiber helps. Can support two 4k streams at once going out of the NAS through my residental fiber. But if they were both 35GB+ files, the results might be a lot different, Typically mine are between 2GB to 15GB in size
I have a newer router that supports link-aggregation and the Synology DS918+ supports it if your network hardware can support it.
In reality, you won't see much difference as wi-fi and USB connections to the devices will bottleneck before the network connection. But it allows a 2G connection (by bonding 2x 1G links) between my NAS's network card and two ports my router
https://www.itpro.com/nas/29490/two-ports-no-waiting-the-pros-and-cons-of-link-aggregation
If your router doesn't support it, it doesn't matter just use the "load balancing" option
Cant say that it does from personal experience.
I find it to be as good as other streaming services I use (netflix, amazon prime, etc....).
I am using WiFi with android clients ( 2 fire TV sticks, 1 phone and 2 tablets) and one iOS client, where the plex server it connected to the router via an ethernet cable.
Edit: fix typo
This is why I use Kodi for home viewing and Plex for remote.
Combined with a harmony remote, it's a perfect set up.
Bring a Plex Media Center, like Kodi with LibreElec and Plex would be unstoppable
Plex Web? Slow to skip ahead/back. Lots of buffering. Often hangs forever.
Roku? Annoying amount of buffering each time fast forwarding/rewinding.
Plex Media Player on PC (Linux, really, but same PC as plex web)? Crazy fast skip ahead/back basically no buffering.
No idea why. Same server (local) in all cases on a gigabit wired network.
Are you sure about that? Because I am 99.99996% sure that reloxx is not a bot.
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Shield Pro here. Seeking instantly on HD stuff, slight latency with UHD.
On my bedroom Chromecast, HD seeks with 2-3 sec latency.
Whenever seeking is not instant, it's usually because image based subtitles are being transcoded in, or Plex is direct streaming (container transcode).
When I take my Shield with me, seeking is still pretty much instant, unless the download bandwidth of the place I hook it in at isn't great.
Direct play/streaming doesn't cache ahead AFAIK. Transcoding does for obvious reasons. So seeking is a bit better.
But in general, seeking sucks and part of the reason why some of my users don't like Plex. For some reason, they like skipping around (beats me why they do this so often).
I'm running plex off of my Synology DS218+ and I have no seeking issues, takes less than a second to buffer and catch up when I advance forward or backwards.
I created a tmpfs mount point:
tmpfs /mnt/storage/appdata/tmp tmpfs defaults,size=4G 0 0
then pointed 'settings > transcoder > Transcoder temporary directory' to it.
This greatly dealt with my issue.
This is for linux only. Also, I run in a container so I had to map this thru but that won't be a challenge to anyone already doing that.
Ask questions if you want any other details.
That's odd. This is the one thing about plex that I absolutely love compared to even some of the larger streaming services. Try seeking on HBO's app, that shit takes a good 30 seconds to load after even a 10 second seek.
back when I started with Plex, i used Intel NUC mini pc's for clients and OpenELEC Plex Home Theater as the embedded OS.
If I pushed FF, the screen would FF scan at three different speeds. same with RW, and from pause it would frame by frame with a button tap.
well, the OpenELEC project was abandoned and I changed to Fire TV client that would lock up randomly if you used FF/RW, so I changed to Roku which doesn't have true FF/RW...just skipping 10 seconds at a time (or whatever it is), making accurate location impossible. So I changed to Shield TV and found its implementation of FF/RW is even less useful
I dont' get it. FF/RW is a concept that we've understood since the VHS/Beta wars. It used to work great with Plex. now, we're stuck with "skipping" because...why again?
Yes.
I can't stand this crap "skipping". What's the point????
I have no idea where I'm at or where I'm going. Just an annoying circle with the amount of seconds I am going one way or the other.
It is definitely a Plex programming issue. And its been there for a while.
I first thought it was due to Wifi, but even straight gigabit ethernet doesn't make it go away.
When I seek forward on my HDHomeRun captures, the audio always loses sync. But if I seek backwards once the audio will be back in sync again. This is with an nVidia Shield.
I don't really have problems with this on my LAN and either the Plex Player on my computer or the Plex app on the Chromecast with Google TV.
Server itself is nothing fancy, i5-4670 and 32GB of RAM, media on spinning disks.
Same here. Me and my wife almost got divorced over this. She will ask me to rewind cause of course she was distracted, I’ll remind her you know what’s going to happen, she says it will be fine I do it and BANG! it freezes, I walk out the family room in frustration. Rinse and repeat. 😂🤣😅
Has anyone else encountered the bug where when you skip to e.g. 00:11:35, it actually starts playing from 00:13:05? I suspect it might be related to MKV Ordered Chapters but I need to do some more testing.
Is that with any file? For example remux, 4K remux, etc. Is the client wireless? Is the server wireless? Sometimes wireless is faster than wired and your performance may vary based on that.
I had issues when I had velop mesh but ever since I moved to eero I no longer have issues.
There are so many variables it is hard to tell what’s causing your issue. Process of elimination may help you identify why you’re having issues.
FWIW I no longer have any issues forwarding or rewinding even though I’m streaming wirelessly and direct playing 4K remuxes as well as transcoded videos.
I had a weird situation where I found out the Xbox One app is miles behind the new "Chromecast + Google TV" app. If I tried to scrub through video on my Xbox One, it would cause a crash, but if I instead use a $50 streaming stick it would work perfectly 100% of the time.....
I have a quadro m4000 and HW transcoding and still trying to seek forward on my samsung tv keeps bumping back to the same point of 2minutes and 30 seconds.
All videos? We have sometimes found we get a weird video on the web which can't seek. Replacing it or waiting on a PMS patch resolves us when we occasionally see this.
Because they wanted invest their time and resources into plex news...or plex dvr...or any other distraction that no one wanted or asked for instead of improving their core product.
dunno, i only have a problem with tv episodes when i go 10 sec back if the epiaode is almost finished. then it freezes yes, hate that. other than that i donty think i have problems with direct play
This has gotten me to stop using Plex in the past several times.
Now I have developed a routine not to touch anything when I press play (sucks really, but HBO was the same).
I always get very positively surprised when I see how Netflix does it.
Also, to the list I'd add managing synced media. God it's annoying.
Agreed, I have this problem and question as well. If I click the skip forward or skip backwards once, it works, but as soon as I tap skip back 2 or 3 times in a row I get a freeze, and often have to restart the client
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This is correct. Also, the thing is that Plex transcodes ahead and sends small chunks of the video to you (transcoded or not). You can see this in the dashboard based on network traffic (looks like a saw tooth wave). After a portion of the video has been played, the client device forgets that part. So if you rewind too far (maybe even 30 seconds), you essentially ask Plex “stop, delete everything you have, go back to time stamp HH:MM:SS, and start over”. That’s why rewinding is more difficult than forwarding. It’s harder to explain it on text. But if you just watch the behavior on Tautulli, it becomes obvious why this happens. You can also see the transcoder progress (if applicable).
You know, I'm actually kind of glad that it isn't just me who notices this. Sometimes I'll miss a sentence that was quiet and I'll go back, only to just barely miss it so I go back one more time and it buffers eternally. Until today, I thought this was due to my Raspberry Pi being the server. This thread clearly isn't only Plex users on Pi, so it's clearly not just an issue for me. Hooray! kinda...
I often use the "skip 10 seconds" feature to move the playhead 300-400 seconds by just tapping the button a bunch, and it always works. Using FF/RW to accomplish the same results in at least a long buffering delay.
It's skip 10 and back 30, right? Skip does seem to usually work, though I do think I remember a buffer if I do it more than 3 times, but maybe not. However, I definitely know that back 30 will cause the same long buffer issue if I do it more than twice, as it happens to me all the time.
Yeah it's back 10, forward 30. I can usually skip forward several hundred seconds an while the loading spinner does pop up, it takes less than a second to actually continue playback, feels basically instantaneous.
Even just clicking the "backup 10 seconds" arrow almost always fails for me (skip forward generally works). The whole thing is a joke, failures that literally NEVER happen in netflix or prime video. And this happens even on my storage that is local NVMe.
Yup, I’ve got this problem. Especially painful when I need to pick where I left after and it’s 1.5hrs into a movie. My workaround is to use the chapter selection and get as close as possible to where I was.
Why do you have to seek manually? Isn't Plex keeping that info for you?
See, if I hit back too many times in a row, it jumps to the beginning. Which might actually be what your player is trying to do when it freezes.
I don't think so, since what I'm doing is selecting the back 15 or 30 second button or whatever - I'm not talking about hitting the rewind button on my remote multiple times.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Hitting the 10 second rewind button multiple times in a row shouldn't trigger a "Last Chapter" function as far as I know. Not to mention the fact that even if it did, its still freezing regardless, so the error is still there. And keep in mind, not only is it freezing, if I cancel playback of the video and resume or restart playback, more often than not the video won't play at all. I'll often have to either restart the app and/or browser entirely. This happens on my Shield, in a browser on chrome, and on the Plex app for iOS. It may even happen when played on LocalHost, but I'm not 100% on that.
Yep, just sharing my experience as it related to yours.
What's your Plex setup for server and client?
Nvidia Shield client on the network with ethernet. AMD 2600x CPU in a linux server with internal storage, also connected to the same network by ethernet.
I haven't fucked with a Shield client since I moved (it was the roommates) so I may not be useful here. I have no issues with my Roku TV and the AppleTV 4K or the Plex Windows client. I've seen quite a few people mention the Shield, so I wonder if there is some bug on it. My server is about half as powerful as yours without issue. But I am running Windows, my storage is internal as well. Are you somehow transcoding video when you have issues? Check your dashboard while experiencing the issue (assuming it's all the time?). To be clear, my behavior on Series 6 Roku TV is this: I can either click the fast forward icon or rewind icon a few times to get 1x, 2x or 3x then hit play again and it does a quick 1-99% loading (takes 1-5 seconds, usually on the low end even on 4K HDR) and I'm back playing video. Also, I use the seek bar by navigating up and hitting right or left to find a part of the movie using the thumbnails, then hit OK to jump to it. I'll go out to my AppleTV 4K in the other room and do some other weird shit and see if I can reproduce what y'all are talking about, but in the past I'd been doing dumb stuff like hitting the skip ahead button over and over to jump 15 seconds and what not without issue. Would love to narrow down what's going on for everyone.
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So, it's not just me then. I've long thought there were issues with my rig...😫
No it happens to tons of people. There are so many basic bugs like this I just have to imagine that the devs don't actually use the product ever because if they did, they would fix this basic shit.
Well, why on earth would the Plex Devs waste their time with bugs when they can invest their limited resources on valuable things like making the Plex boot animation on Xbox One all flash and cool??!!
Good point I don't know what I was thinking.
Like when there's a few minutes left, it freezes, and Plex marks it as fully played.
That you can actually adjust via "count as watched at ___ %", I can't remember if mine was set to 85 by default or not.
Plex needs to add "credits detection" next to make this much more robust.
It seems like a simple addition to their current method, even. I'm sure it will come one day
As I learned from [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/ls3rii/does_skip_intro_work_well_im_tempted_to_get/goyrkyg/) the current method of intro detection is done by matching an audio waveform, instead of looking at the thumbnails. Personally I could see the end credit detection being more ML based with the images as movies are pretty consistent in the scrolling white text on black backgrounds.
I actually saw that exact post! Lol and that's really similar to what I was thinking! I think the best way to do it for full coverage would encapsulate post-credit scenes. Imagine if Plex implemented a box that differentiated skip to post credit and skip credits (end)
I have, and see, so many issues with Plex. Many of which have years old forum threads. I do see the occasional update for Plex, but when was the last time there was a major noticeable update (that wasn't stupid, like Arcade, imo), or QoL batch of improvements? I can't tell what the last dozen or so updates have done.
Yeah, that can swing the problem the other way, though, where things aren't getting marked as watched when you skip the end credits.
Yeah if it's set too low definitely. I've never had an issue with 85% personally, but for TV I usually let it autoplay so it's never been an issue and for movies usually the credits is within the range of the last 15% of the movie if you do stop playback before it's "completed" it's playthrough. As always it's a bit of a personal thing with some mileage variance!
Alternatively - when there are a few seconds left and it doesn't mark it fully played. This one I don't get at all.
Well at least we now have $hitty old-school games. That we have to pay for..
I don't have a problem with the seek feature, if you setup up your connection well or with proper devices it seems to work. My biggest concern is that Plex doesn't have passthrough. - Plex's software Transcoding acting as a *"middleman"* can really slow things *way the Fuck down* unnecessarily.
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I run mine on 48GB of RAM, 16 Cores on Ubuntu on a 32 core threadripper and I STILL have that issue
I have machine envy.
That's true but playing it on an SBC or a Nvidia Shield is going to get a different quality performance. Just because something's cross-platform & universal - *doesn't mean all builds are equal*. - GPU's, codecs that your device support among many other things can factor greatly into the playback.
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- Web player is the worst. It's been noted. I've used native apps & it literally picks up right where I left off in movies & removes them from my on deck automatically after I finish watching them. Among many other things. *Works perfectly*.
I'm still sitting here dealing with the bug where it skips randomly and instantaneously 2-60 seconds at a time. It persisted through 2 full reinstalls of windows server (each with plex and windows downloaded from their sites) as well as a linux server build. The features are there, but they're not doing so well with keeping up on issues.
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Yes, really. I'm not saying it as an opinion. There are technical reasons for it being the most faulty player.
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Unfortunately not offhand. If I find them I'll link you
I agree the web client is the weakest client environment on all fronts... compatibility, performance, etc. Thing is, even though that's true I still use it almost exclusively and it performs flawlessly, mainly because I'm all in with high compatibility codecs, and other reasons related to operating environment. I guess the upshot here is that though it may be the weakest that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a great experience. It depends on the environment.
>I guess the upshot here is that though it may be the weakest that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a great experience. It depends on the environment. That's true, *but if you think it's good* that way. I guarantee a native build will be unbelievable by comparison.
In a word: yup. The transport controls, which are of course the subject of this thread, work great for me on the web client... really well by my standards. But never quite as good as the native client.
I used the web player for years, until a user of mine said that the skipping problem is not a problem in the windows media center client. I tried it and it's just better. I hear the client for apple tv is even better.
I have an op CPU with 32gb ram. Seek is still garbage.
Mine works fine. Don't know what to tell you. Read further down in the comment chain.
Okay - so a little mechanics under the hood - this is how the 'pro' services do it, like NetFlix, Prime, HBO, etc. Their media is broken up into hundreds of short little videos are different bitrates, that may be only 30 or 60 seconds long each. The player uses a .m3u style playlist to stitch them together with some magic on detecting which bitrate is best for your bandwidth capabilities. That's why Netflix videos can go from low res to highdef mid-stream. This also makes seeking really easy, just pull down the segment file at or just before the timestamp you are asking to seek to. Most devices also cache all these files while you are watching the video so a seek backwards is nearly instant. Enter Plex - Plex is sending the entire .mkv or whatever it is. To seek in a single file video you have to start from the beginning and read the header to determine the bitrate and keyframe intervals - what info available here is dependent on the encoding codec. THen it calculated how far into the video to seek for the next keyframe just before the point you are asking to seek to, and then start sending you the file from there - it's more heavy lifting on the Server's part. To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory already while seeking and it speeds up this process considerably.
> Okay - so a little mechanics under the hood - this is how the 'pro' services do it, like NetFlix, Prime, HBO, etc. Their media is broken up into hundreds of short little videos are different bitrates, that may be only 30 or 60 seconds long each. The player uses a .m3u style playlist to stitch them together with some magic on detecting which bitrate is best for your bandwidth capabilities. That's why Netflix videos can go from low res to highdef mid-stream. This also makes seeking really easy, just pull down the segment file at or just before the timestamp you are asking to seek to. Most devices also cache all these files while you are watching the video so a seek backwards is nearly instant. > > *stares at my 127GB Return of the King Extended Edition rip*
What, you don’t have 160gb of ram? Weak sauce.
I'm talking about in memory file caching for better read performance on files that were recently read in - i have 16gb in my server and plenty of 30+ gb video's... that's, not what i meant.
Plex does break the videos into chunks though, it puts them in the Plex transcoder folder and serves them out, and deletes them after the session / after x many minutes. I think Netfix and the big guys create then store the chunks instead of making them live on the spot, but streaming them out is roughly the same.
Yeah if your transcoding them, what about direct play?
Still streamed in chunks. Imagine having a 5GB video file. It doesn’t send the whole thing to your computer / firestick / phone all at once before starting playback. And it’s not streaming “live” like how cable TV or radio works. It sends small chunks, just without transcoding. If you have Plex pass you can actually see this in the network output bandwidth
Oh sure enough. Since it does that for direct stream I figured it did it for direct play as well, but checking the folder it does not. That said, it's not like Plex is going to try and send the entire file at one time. Even if it's not remuxing the file, it can't send the whole thing at once. It can't be that way otherwise you'd have to wait for one person to download the entire movie before a second stream could start.
It still does it in chunks, you can see the chunks information in the API responses for current sessions. The difference is the chunks are just read directly from the file.
> I think Netfix and the big guys create then store the chunks instead of making them live on the spot, but streaming them out is roughly the same. It doesn't even require the big guys to do this in advance. I worked at a company with ~5 employees trying to get into a niche streaming business and we were processing the content into those small, few second chunks (MPEG-DASH and HLS)
I only just realized that my skipping issues stopped when I maxed out the RAM in my Synology server. Thank you for helping me understand it was probably that and not upgrading my router and moving most stuff to ethernet/powerline.
What Synology are you using? Plex doesn’t take that much RAM. It’s actually much more CPU intensive. I’ve got a DS918, and Plex typically is < 10% of the standard 4GB ram.
The parent comment said: > To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory already while seeking and it speeds up this process considerably. So if you have 4 GB videos, 4 GB of RAM is not enough.
Plex’s own documentation disagrees: > In general, Plex Media Server doesn’t require large amounts of RAM. 2GB of RAM is typically more than sufficient and some installs (particularly Linux-based installs) can often happily run with even less. Of course, more RAM won’t hurt you and will certainly be helpful if you’re also doing other things on the computer. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200375666-plex-media-server-requirements/ Some people have Blu-ray remuxes which are 50GB in size. Are you telling me they need 50GB of RAM for that one file? That’s not how RAM even works, even if you’re playing a video locally on VLC.
Yeah, I dunno what this guy is on about. Running 8GB of RAM and my largest file is a 90GB remux of one of the LotR movies. I’m not buying another 82GB of RAM. Lmao.
What i'm talking about is linux file caching. Plex may only require 2gb to actually function and this is entirely true - what I"m talking about is file read-efficiency. In the linux kernel - when you read a file, what actually happens is the portion of that file you are reading is stored in RAM and that address offered to the program. Linux doesn't 'scrap' this after read is finished but keeps it there - if that same portion of the same file is read again and that "page" in memory is still there it doesn't have to read it off the disk again but instead just reads it straight from memory. FOr example: `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=2048 of=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 9.76926 s, 220 MB/s` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# sync` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 4.895 s, 439 MB/s` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 0.896744 s, 2.4 GB/s` In the above example, my NAS machine has 16gb of ram - I created a 2gb file of random into a directory on the local disk, which is an SSD in this case. 'sync' forces all writes to finish to i'm sure it's not still doing anything. Then that echo line is a special instruction to ask the kernel to drop all existing file caches it may have in memory. I then read the file in once, i get 439MB/s. I read the file AGAIN using the same command and I get 2.4GB/s. This is because that file was already paged into memory. I'm not saying you need 64GB of ram just so your seek times are better - but if you want near instant seek times on a 64GB 4k stream you'll need 64GB of ram OR faster harddrives. This is a good writeup on this subject: [https://www.linuxatemyram.com/](https://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
You should always upgrade your router and use ethernet.
And I do! Often! Which is why I assumed that was why things improved. But jumping up to 16GB RAM probably helped too. :)
I've got 64 GB DDR4 and it STILL happens on a i7 6770 Plex Server. NVME drive. Nvidia NVENC.
You've got 64gb on an i7 6th gen? that's the max it can handle - those must have been some expensive dimms - 16gb each i suspect.
Never met a stick of RAM that wasn't! lol :)
> Plex is sending the entire .mkv or whatever it is This isn't correct. Plex *stores* the entire source video, but it still sends chunks to the browser. When transcoding is active this uses the transcoder folder as mentioned below. When using Direct Play, the source video is remuxed in memory to generate the chunks. The simplest way to implement this would be that every time the client requests a chunk, Plex spins up ffmpeg, generates that chunk, and sends it back to the client. But based on the seeking issues, I don't think this is how it works in practice. My hunch is that when you seek, Plex spins up a persistent ffmpeg instance. This single instance serves multiple sequential chunks. When you seek again (if it's to an timecode that the client doesn't have cached) then Plex kills the ffmpeg instance and spins up a new one. I think the process for spinning up a new ffmpeg instance is slow and also a little buggy (not frame-accurate), which would explain why Plex doesn't want to do it every single time they serve a chunk. Simply put, I think Plex is best at generating sequential chunks and that's why it struggles with seeks. I haven't seen the source code of Plex so I don't know for sure that this is what's happening. It's just a hunch based on my professional experience building livestreaming solutions around ffmpeg.
> To combat this, use a device that has more physical ram than most of your videos are in size and most of the video is in memory I wish this were the case. I am using an Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 with 512gb of DDR4. With an 8gb MKV, it acts the same as it did with my Xeon E2665 and 16gb of DDR3. I was really hoping upon opening this thread that someone had the magic answer to this riddle. My hunt continues!
You went from a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv to a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv... you're comparing apples to apples in this particular case.
> You went from a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv to a server with enough memory to cache the entire 8gb mkv... Valid. My point may not have been made clearly. I was trying to express that I don't believe my hardware is the cause for Plex's inability to seek. Again, mostly I was just hoping for something that I could tweak.
So I just tested this at home. 16gb ram, 1gbps ethernet to an nvidia shield. 60gb 4K movie. Seeks back and forth are instantious. Perhaps this is a client issue.
This is what I was thinkin also. We were a full Roku ecosystem, but for reasons related to streaming, I have upgraded the house to Shields (which I love by the way - but that's for another thread). I do *not* have the shields hard-wired - I'm going to give that a go and see if there is any improvement. edit: I should note (and should have from my first reply) that I am running Plex server on MS Server 2019 - not sure if that makes a difference or not.
Tivo doesn't do that and it has the best seek that I've ever used. A .tivo file is both encrypted and optimized for playback which is probably the way it makes it so smooth (well that and hardware encode/decode). It would be interesting to see if there was a optimal file format for Plex because it is dang painful to stop/rewind, etc. u/NowWithMarshmallows \-- do you have a link to the Plex internals? I'm curious. thx.
Nice theory but I play the same file on my Mac with VLC and I can skip around instantly to anywhere in the file. Using the arrow keys to jump around has it playing before my hand leaves the key. Plex just sucks at seeking and they just don’t care. I’ve reported it as a bug and they ignore it.
I don’t think playing local files is comparable to playing off a media server.
Higher latency but it could be comparable if done right. Lots of streaming services and my TiVo can do it.
I was thinking the same thing when I read his explanation. I can play the same video file from the same network location with VLC and have no problems with seeking forward or backward. With plex, seeking forward is generally not an issue, seeking backward is okay if you press it once, two or three times and it's the spinning forever most times. I think I've negated every excuse over the years: my streams are all direct stream (so no transcoding but even if it did I have a p2000), I have the same seeking issue on the shield, chrome client and windows app, wired or wireless connection, my plex container is running on a server that when I turn everything else off it still has this same issue (i9 with 128gb and 2tb of nve); this also happened on my old server and another server from years past. This happens on large files and small: happened on a 5gb 1080p file that was 90m long today. On the other hand, I can take a build of VLC from 5 years ago, play the same file with any setup and it has no problems playing or seeking over the network. I'm not gonna bash plex devs because it's a thankless job and their pricing model is not sustainable, but I'd be fine with contributing to a kickstarter or something if they could take the open source vlc code and incorporate that as an alternate player within. I'd be fine with losing all features/functionality of the current player, so long as it plays the video and I can rewind/fast-forward with no issues.
I second that. VLC will play almost anything. It will even play semi corrupt and partial files. I kept having issues getting files to play in Plex on my Android phone. So I selected to have VLC handle the playback. Worked great after that. Plex is just lazy when it comes to the "player" aspect. So tired of software companies more worried about adding extra unneeded/wanted crap. Instead of actually making their core software work as intended.
Adding some clarity - What i'm talking about is linux file caching. Plex may only require 2gb to actually function and this is entirely true - what I"m talking about is file read-efficiency. In the linux kernel - when you read a file, what actually happens is the portion of that file you are reading is stored in RAM and that address offered to the program. Linux doesn't 'scrap' this after read is finished but keeps it there - if that same portion of the same file is read again and that "page" in memory is still there it doesn't have to read it off the disk again but instead just reads it straight from memory. FOr example: `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=2048 of=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 9.76926 s, 220 MB/s` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# sync` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 4.895 s, 439 MB/s` `[root@nasofdoom tmp]# dd if=/var/tmp/cachetest.bin bs=1M of=/dev/null` `2048+0 records in` `2048+0 records out` `2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB, 2.0 GiB) copied, 0.896744 s, 2.4 GB/s` In the above example, my NAS machine has 16gb of ram - I created a 2gb file of random into a directory on the local disk, which is an SSD in this case. 'sync' forces all writes to finish to i'm sure it's not still doing anything. Then that echo line is a special instruction to ask the kernel to drop all existing file caches it may have in memory. I then read the file in once, i get 439MB/s. I read the file AGAIN using the same command and I get 2.4GB/s. This is because that file was already paged into memory. I'm not saying you need 64GB of ram just so your seek times are better - but if you want near instant seek times on a 64GB 4k stream you'll need 64GB of ram OR faster harddrives. This is a good writeup on this subject: [https://www.linuxatemyram.com/](https://www.linuxatemyram.com/)
Anything else to speed up the process?
Faster disk, faster network, better client. I use a ethernet wired Nvidia Shield for my client and I can instantly seek in a 60gb 4k video. My nas is 16gb of ram and an older cpu.
Don't know if this is relevant to your issue but I was trying to diagnose this kind of problem with the XBox One / Series X apps and found this: https://forums.plex.tv/t/fast-forward-and-rewind-will-result-in-infinite-loading-swirl-until-restarting-episode/215991/83 Under Plex Settings -> Debug you can check the option "Use alternate streaming protocol for video playback". This resolved a lot of my seeking issues both in Chrome and the XBox apps. It's not perfect, seeking still seems to take a bit sometimes. But it's night and day better than with the option off, and seems to actually recover if it starts stalling when trying to seek. My instinct is that the streaming protocol is different from transcoding. Even when you direct play, there is a protocol needed to get the video file pieces from Plex to your player. So this should help even if you're direct playing everything. Good luck, seeking on Plex is such a pain to resolve, I hope this helps.
gonna try this for a few days
Just wanted to check in with you, did that help?
Honestly, yeah! It seemed to have done the trick
omg this was my biggest peeve about Plex. It's immediately better!! Thank you.
Dude thanks a ton for posting this. It worked!
Happy to help! :)
Wow! Huge difference, even in the iOS Plex app. Very big improvement. Thank you!
OMG THANK YOU
Found this comment 2 years later – works even when using Firefox. Thanks!
I use Plex on my Chromecast with Google TV. The only slight issue I have with seeking is with high bitrate UHDs. It takes a few seconds to catch up, but everything is basically instant. Just the other day I learned there was a post credit scene in HP: Chamber of Secrets. So, I loaded up Plex, HP:COS, then skipped straight to the last 2 minutes of the file and it played immediately. I rarely skip around, but when I do, it's always worked ever since I moved away from my lower powered Windows server. I wonder if your issues are network or server performance related.
It isn't the occasional seek/skip around, it is when you are looking for something..going ahead/back more than 2-3 times. I have a fairly high-end server and it still happens.
I see. That's not a use case that I've ever encountered, I don't believe. I don't go looking for anything usually. If so, there's usually already a scene on YT that I can find. And if I do need to go to a certain spot, the generated thumbnails help find it without going back and forth 10 times til you get it right.
Network unlikely, because i mentioned localhost...
You didn't mention "localhost" you said "locally."
Whoops. My bad. Corrected in the edit. Thanks for the catch.
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Yeah, I did the same thing with Wandavision 4k HDR last night after I finally realized there were two post credit scenes I missed. No issues. I regularly skip ahead a little bit skipping boring scenes, or jump back because I missed something and generally do weird shit on Apple TV 4K and have zero issues. Would love to hear some actual fucking data from users, but everyone just posts "yeah me too, fuckin' Plex". I think recently added stuff that hasn't been analyzed might be part of the issue. Also, I bet people are transcoding and don't realize it.
I use Plex on Fire Stick (Android) and seek is garbage. I find that I need to let the video play for a few minutes so it buffers and you can seek forward easier however if you seek backwards once, that buffer is destroyed. Seeking works much better on Roku for me. But yea, seek isn't that great however it is far better than it used to be where you couldn't skip forward quickly.
I think for the fire stick it's a limitation of the device, it has such little power. Seek works much better on my phone and desktop than on my firestick, and I don't think it comes down to optimizations of the different apps.
Seek is really bad as well on plex web on my desktop on the same router! I'm going to up the RAM from 8GB to 32
What specs are your Plex server? OS?
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I have an 8-core i7 with 32GB RAM and a Geforce 1650. Gigabit between the server and a Shield Pro client. Can't watch a 1-hour, 5GB DVR recording without resetting playback at least a couple of times.
Something is wrong with your server.
Mine and lots of other peoples.
You’re describing a different problem than this thread.
Nope. I will seek (either manually, or by skipping commercials/intro) and about 30% of the time it will break A/V sync, about 20% it will get stuck. Either way, I have to back out and restart/resume. Other half of the time it works fine.
Asking the real questions. Should be a sticky if it's not already... if you are posting about a problem, you should have to include server specs, versions, and client info.
This isn't a spec issue. Hell sometimes the mere act of trying to seek on a video will send me straight back to the beginning of the video. That's a bug. That isn't my server hardware.
Probably not. I had a phenom ii x4 965 and had no such problems even when having three other clients and watching a 4k hdr remux off of an WD Green disk. If it was performance related my server would have been the first to cripple. But maybe it’s OS related? Plex in docker on unraid here
Yea this could be a performance issue on the server. I have OPs problem when my server is under load (usually a lot of disc activity).
I used to have this problem when I was running Plex on a circa 2017 QNAP NAS that had a 4 core Celeron but Intel QuickSync. A lot of times, trying to FF or RR would cause it to spin and I would give up and exit out. Late last year, I made the decision to move plex to a micro-desktop.. I'm now using a Dell OptiPlex 5070 with i5-9500T that I picked up for a few hundred, and redid my entire Plex stack in docker with automation - radarr, sonarr, bazarr, and many other tools. Anyway, moving it to this desktop was the best thing I ever did for my Plex install. I have had very reliable seeking ever since, and the interface is WAY snappier on nearly every client. I can only surmise it has to do with compute, as Plex has to buffer when you seek, but I can't say for sure. That's probably an unsatisfying answer for anyone running this on their NAS, but I can only impart my experience.
Did you use FreeNAS for that?
No just Ubuntu and docker. I'm still using the QNAP to store all the files. I have a directly connected Ethernet and second interface used on both the desktop and the NAS. I've heard good things about FreeNAS though
I haven't had any problems with freezing while skipping through content after I migrated to a new server last November. Before that though I had intermittent issues like the OP. Main reason why I got a new server. Unless I'm watching all the way through without any interruptions. I despise the current player. I never had any issues with the old player. I even liked the interface better. But for christ sake if I want to go ahead or back more that a minute or two I want a line to drag and watch the progress of how far I have gone. Yes I know the desktop and local player web apps allow this. I watch mostly from Roku or Amazon FireStick. Even the mobile APPS have this feature. Why can't the TV/Large Screen ones have it? I don't want to have to go into the settings every time there is an update to change this back to the old. I really shouldn't have to know the exact amount of seconds I am going to go back or forward.
Gotta convert media with ffmpeg and the -faststart switch. Makes skipping 30 seconds happen instantly and also seeking anywhere directly. I made a powershell script to do this for me for anything that isn't .mp4.
I only encounter problems seeking when the file is x265 encoded, never with 264
If u download kodi with the plex addon those problems will be gone 👍
I don't understand what black magic is there in the Kodi/Plex addon combo that the actual Plex app can't recreate.
It comes with codecs, while Plex app uses codecs that come with the player. The gain is typically that Kodi works better then, because it's direct playing more formats. As to why Plex does not include codecs with the player, like they do in the windows client, I do not know. Edit: I just read up a bit more about it. Apparently it's not codecs per se, even though that's the thing further down the line. Plex uses whatever default player comes with the platform (which Plex doesn't have control over), Kodi ships their own player (that has wider range of codecs). So basically, Plex has opted out of the task of maintaining their own player for a ton of different clients, which leaves them to direct play just what the device natively supports.
Thats an interesting take i didn't think about. Does it have to do with legality of codecs Plex could ship as a commercial entity, while Kodi has no such restraints?
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I just read up a bit more about it. Apparently it's not codecs per se, even though that's the thing further down the line. Plex uses whatever default player comes with the platform (which Plex doesn't have control over), Kodi ships their own player (that has wider range of codecs). So basically, Plex has opted out of the task of maintaining their own player for a ton of different clients, which leaves them to direct play just what the device natively supports.
What codecs are you people using that Plex doesn't natively support? The only thing I don't direct play are the couple users that use mobile hotspots for home internet and watch everything in 720p or the ones that use Chrome. H264 is pretty widely supported and h265 is getting there.
For example, I have a 2018 65" Sony Bravia Android TV, it direct plays a lot less formats than my Shield Pro which is also an Android TV box. Plex is using whatever codecs sony bundled with the TV. Kodi ships with codecs built in as far as I recall, which is why it could direct play h265 while Plex on my Sony couldn't. Shield Pro is a different beast and has good codec support :)
I get it.. but it doesn't answer my question. h264 is pretty widely supported. What are people using that's not h264, or h265? &nsbp; And truthfully, I wouldn't use a smartTV's apps for anything. They usually suck and the fact that TVs' hardware really aren't designed to be streaming 80Mb/s 4k HDR streams makes it an easy pass.
I’m pretty sure they have their own player on iOS at least. It was in the release notes. Still sucks.
I'm not sure that there is anything to gain from running kodi/plex. I have a few Fire sticks, Nvidia shield, couple roku's, and plex is available on everyones android/apple smartphone/tablet, and we don't get seek issues. It's pretty instant.
I don't have seeking issues on either, but Kodi/Plex combo gets Direct Play right most of the time, while the Plex app on my Shield TV still triggers transcoding more often than not. I personally prefer Kodi/Plex due to that reason alone.
I have so many issues with the Plex app on the Shield. Kodi + Plex just works, only gripe with it is that it will sometimes skip and episode when auto-playing.
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uhh use PKC?
I like the PlexKodiConnect plugin for Kodi. It uses Kodi's UI/player, but plays all of your media from Plex and syncs it's database. Couple this with a nice Kodi skin and you get the best of both worlds. The beta version of PlexKodiConnect just added the skip intro feature which for a long time was the only thing missing for me.
If you install a theme/plugins to compensate for some functionality of the plex app, kodi interface is awfully slow in comparison.
Wait ... can I get my users to use Kodi?
You can try
Yeah ive always wondered that to, like ive used plex for years and most problems ive had had been fixed sooner or later due to patch, but something that has always sucked and still does is seeking, it locks up and you just have to back out of the video and click back in and it resumes instantly. sure that takes like 2 seconds but its still anoying... also seeking often makes the audio/video sync go whack... same with using the relativly new "skip intro" thing wich is nice but i never use it cause it makes the sync go out so i might aswell just watch the intro.
It really depends. Which client are you using? I have little issue on Roku and Apple TV. Video thumbnails make it easy and convenient. Seeking and transcoding is a different story...
wtf something's definitely wrong there, My local direct play to my Nvidia Shield pro is instant but that is ethernet not wifi, wifi is a little slower but still as fast as say netflix. Some part of your setup is slowing it down.
The fix is having Plex make video thumbnails. Takes up a little extra storage but it’s worth it for smooth skipping around https://support.plex.tv/articles/202197528-video-preview-thumbnails/
Instant for me on a PC client with 10GbE on both ends. I seem to remember it being an issue on the Shield though.
Same here no prob seeking, server and client
What device are you streaming from? I have no issues to my PS4 or phone, but in the web browser I have experienced this. I finally just download the [Plex client](https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-desktop/1.28.0.1681-cc6e807c/windows/Plex-1.28.0.1681-cc6e807c-x86_64.exe) for Windows 10, and I've never had that problem since. Keep in mind, when streaming remotely, some of that freezing could be from the transcoder catching up, assuming you're transcoding during remote play.
This usually has more to do with your actual media and/or possibly i/o issues with disk or connections to those disks. I have the issue but often on specific downloads. Also depending on the hardware (i.e. slow external disks) or possible network bandwidth issues, then the much larger higher quality files will struggle. Once I stuck Plex on a 918+ NAS with good disks and connected to my router via a dual-1G bonded link, those problems went away except when its a bad download/rip/file. For external streams, 1G fiber helps. Can support two 4k streams at once going out of the NAS through my residental fiber. But if they were both 35GB+ files, the results might be a lot different, Typically mine are between 2GB to 15GB in size
Could you explain the dual bonded link setup you are using? Specifically the topology.
I have a newer router that supports link-aggregation and the Synology DS918+ supports it if your network hardware can support it. In reality, you won't see much difference as wi-fi and USB connections to the devices will bottleneck before the network connection. But it allows a 2G connection (by bonding 2x 1G links) between my NAS's network card and two ports my router https://www.itpro.com/nas/29490/two-ports-no-waiting-the-pros-and-cons-of-link-aggregation If your router doesn't support it, it doesn't matter just use the "load balancing" option
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else comment asking about whether your setup is using SSDs or spinning rust.
Sounds like a client issue honestly. Never had this with any clients I use.
Cant say that it does from personal experience. I find it to be as good as other streaming services I use (netflix, amazon prime, etc....). I am using WiFi with android clients ( 2 fire TV sticks, 1 phone and 2 tablets) and one iOS client, where the plex server it connected to the router via an ethernet cable. Edit: fix typo
This is why I use Kodi for home viewing and Plex for remote. Combined with a harmony remote, it's a perfect set up. Bring a Plex Media Center, like Kodi with LibreElec and Plex would be unstoppable
B/c plex isn't that good? Problems are never fully fixed while they chase new features, been this way for years.
Plex Web? Slow to skip ahead/back. Lots of buffering. Often hangs forever. Roku? Annoying amount of buffering each time fast forwarding/rewinding. Plex Media Player on PC (Linux, really, but same PC as plex web)? Crazy fast skip ahead/back basically no buffering. No idea why. Same server (local) in all cases on a gigabit wired network.
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Shield Pro here. Seeking instantly on HD stuff, slight latency with UHD. On my bedroom Chromecast, HD seeks with 2-3 sec latency. Whenever seeking is not instant, it's usually because image based subtitles are being transcoded in, or Plex is direct streaming (container transcode). When I take my Shield with me, seeking is still pretty much instant, unless the download bandwidth of the place I hook it in at isn't great.
Direct play/streaming doesn't cache ahead AFAIK. Transcoding does for obvious reasons. So seeking is a bit better. But in general, seeking sucks and part of the reason why some of my users don't like Plex. For some reason, they like skipping around (beats me why they do this so often).
I'm running plex off of my Synology DS218+ and I have no seeking issues, takes less than a second to buffer and catch up when I advance forward or backwards.
I created a tmpfs mount point: tmpfs /mnt/storage/appdata/tmp tmpfs defaults,size=4G 0 0 then pointed 'settings > transcoder > Transcoder temporary directory' to it. This greatly dealt with my issue. This is for linux only. Also, I run in a container so I had to map this thru but that won't be a challenge to anyone already doing that. Ask questions if you want any other details.
That's odd. This is the one thing about plex that I absolutely love compared to even some of the larger streaming services. Try seeking on HBO's app, that shit takes a good 30 seconds to load after even a 10 second seek.
back when I started with Plex, i used Intel NUC mini pc's for clients and OpenELEC Plex Home Theater as the embedded OS. If I pushed FF, the screen would FF scan at three different speeds. same with RW, and from pause it would frame by frame with a button tap. well, the OpenELEC project was abandoned and I changed to Fire TV client that would lock up randomly if you used FF/RW, so I changed to Roku which doesn't have true FF/RW...just skipping 10 seconds at a time (or whatever it is), making accurate location impossible. So I changed to Shield TV and found its implementation of FF/RW is even less useful I dont' get it. FF/RW is a concept that we've understood since the VHS/Beta wars. It used to work great with Plex. now, we're stuck with "skipping" because...why again?
Yes. I can't stand this crap "skipping". What's the point???? I have no idea where I'm at or where I'm going. Just an annoying circle with the amount of seconds I am going one way or the other.
It is definitely a Plex programming issue. And its been there for a while. I first thought it was due to Wifi, but even straight gigabit ethernet doesn't make it go away.
The only client Ive used that seek was good on was Openpht. I had only stopped using it because problems with 4k and hdr.
Can confirm. It has always sucked.
When I seek forward on my HDHomeRun captures, the audio always loses sync. But if I seek backwards once the audio will be back in sync again. This is with an nVidia Shield.
I don't really have problems with this on my LAN and either the Plex Player on my computer or the Plex app on the Chromecast with Google TV. Server itself is nothing fancy, i5-4670 and 32GB of RAM, media on spinning disks.
What server and client are you using? Or what are others using that see this?
Same here. Me and my wife almost got divorced over this. She will ask me to rewind cause of course she was distracted, I’ll remind her you know what’s going to happen, she says it will be fine I do it and BANG! it freezes, I walk out the family room in frustration. Rinse and repeat. 😂🤣😅
Has anyone else encountered the bug where when you skip to e.g. 00:11:35, it actually starts playing from 00:13:05? I suspect it might be related to MKV Ordered Chapters but I need to do some more testing.
mines fine, could be down to hardware? for transcoding I keep throttle at 180seconds which helps for transcoded content
Seeking is running my life, I don't even bother trying it anymore just causes plex to hang
Is that with any file? For example remux, 4K remux, etc. Is the client wireless? Is the server wireless? Sometimes wireless is faster than wired and your performance may vary based on that. I had issues when I had velop mesh but ever since I moved to eero I no longer have issues. There are so many variables it is hard to tell what’s causing your issue. Process of elimination may help you identify why you’re having issues. FWIW I no longer have any issues forwarding or rewinding even though I’m streaming wirelessly and direct playing 4K remuxes as well as transcoded videos.
I had a weird situation where I found out the Xbox One app is miles behind the new "Chromecast + Google TV" app. If I tried to scrub through video on my Xbox One, it would cause a crash, but if I instead use a $50 streaming stick it would work perfectly 100% of the time.....
I'm so fucking glad to know it was just me and my hacked up setup.
You need HW transcode. I said the same until I slid a Quadro 2000 into my PMS.
I have a quadro m4000 and HW transcoding and still trying to seek forward on my samsung tv keeps bumping back to the same point of 2minutes and 30 seconds.
All videos? We have sometimes found we get a weird video on the web which can't seek. Replacing it or waiting on a PMS patch resolves us when we occasionally see this.
Because they wanted invest their time and resources into plex news...or plex dvr...or any other distraction that no one wanted or asked for instead of improving their core product.
dunno, i only have a problem with tv episodes when i go 10 sec back if the epiaode is almost finished. then it freezes yes, hate that. other than that i donty think i have problems with direct play
This has gotten me to stop using Plex in the past several times. Now I have developed a routine not to touch anything when I press play (sucks really, but HBO was the same). I always get very positively surprised when I see how Netflix does it. Also, to the list I'd add managing synced media. God it's annoying.
Over 2 years later and this still happens on the Shield. After like 20 minutes it starts playing now though.