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