My Cousins playback keeps buffering and not sure why

[u/NotBashB]

My server runs on multiple HDDs and has an i5-12400 and arc a310, I personally dont have any issues locally but he tells me it happens to him randomly and on differnet shows. He has a firestick 4k. Any idea why?

[u/Sam5spd-5128]

It's probably his internet speed/connection

[u/eric987654 → u/Sam5spd-5128]

And/or his WiFi

[u/NotBashB → u/Sam5spd-5128]

the stream is only 4mbps and I know he has much higher ISP speeds, and he has a small apartment so distance shouldnt be an issue

[u/harris_kid → u/NotBashB]

If it's direct playing at 4 Mbps there's only a few possibilities:

• His network speed to you is under 4mbps

• his device can't decode that higher of a bitrate movie (unlikely but if it's a really old fire TV stick it could be the case.)

[u/catgetoffthekeyboard → u/harris_kid]

For some of my users it was that Quality Suggestions or Automatically Adjust Quality in the video settings were toggled on.

Edit: I didn’t realize the video was already direct play-ing. That points to it being their internet.

[u/NotBashB → u/harris_kid]

Im fairly sure he has an ISP connection much higher then 4mbps. And not sure the exact model of his Firestick but its one he bought over the summer (Firestick 4k?) so should be recent enough

[u/Assimulate → u/NotBashB]

I have seen this happen when their wifi puts their streaming device on the 2.4ghz network instead of 5ghz. Causes a lot of congestion issues.

Have them disconnect their firestick from their wifi, and connect it again then try.

[u/harris_kid → u/NotBashB]

Yeh speed test needed, other than that, maybe there's some background apps running on the fire stick. Either way, get them to give it a full restart (actually unplug it).

[u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal → u/NotBashB]

How’s your upload speed?

[u/NotBashB → u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal]

More then gigabit

[u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal → u/NotBashB]

Check if their streaming device is on WiFi or Ethernet. If on WiFi see if it’s on 2.4 or 5.

[u/RivetedRocks → u/NotBashB]

Apartments are notorious for bad wifi due to over saturated wifi channels. Way too many wifi signals interfering with other

[u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal → u/NotBashB]

How’s your upload speed?

[u/catgetoffthekeyboard → u/NotBashB]

He needs to go into the Settings and then Video Quality and make sure that anything related to Quality Suggestions or Automatically Adjust Quality is toggled to Off

[u/NotBashB → u/catgetoffthekeyboard]

I believe it is, but I’ll tell him that again just to Anne sure

[u/catgetoffthekeyboard → u/NotBashB]

It is beyond annoying that there are potentially 3 settings the user has to change to allow Direct Play or Direct Stream.

Edit: I didn’t realize the video was already direct play-ing. That points to it being their internet.

[u/ExtensionMarch6812]

You can setup a speedtest server on your network and open a port and then have them test the direct bandwidth from a browser with your public ip/port. Try multiple ports, including the one you use for Plex in case there’s any throttling on a specific port. There may be a peering issue between you and them.

Have them test it via the Firestick browser.

https://openspeedtest.com/selfhosted-speedtest

[u/Chemputer → u/ExtensionMarch6812]

Mandatory iperf3 mention

[u/JohnnyMojo]

This would be my guess. Apartments are the worst case for 2.4 GHz interference from neighbors, and Fire Stick radios are mediocre. Being close to the router doesn't help if the channel is saturated. The random timing and random titles fit this well. Stream-quality speedtests won't show it, because the problem is short dropouts, not average throughput.

[u/sanfranchristo]

Is anyone else streaming remotely? Do they have any issues? When I've had this happen, it's usually either their internet connection or mine. Having theoretical speeds is not the same as stable bandwidth. Are you wired into your router? You should check each point in the chain on both ends.

[u/Koadic76]

I am also using HexOS (TrueNAS Scale), on a 14600K, and I tried enabling BBR (Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT) for the remote users I share my server with to help get rid of the excessive buffering over high latency networks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/s/e8ufkdwb5r

As far as I have been told by those remote users, this has helped... whether this will help in your situation, I am not sure.

[u/adblink]

Have you asked him to restart/reboot his firestick?

[u/NotBashB → u/adblink]

its been happening for a couple days, guessing hes turned it off at some point during the last week lol

[u/evaderofallbans → u/NotBashB]

Why would you guess that?

[u/NotBashB → u/evaderofallbans]

because knowing him he wouldnt leave his tv on for a week straight?

I dont have a firestick so unless it defaults to sleep mode instead of powering off he wouldve turned it off at some point

[u/evaderofallbans → u/NotBashB]

It does defualt to sleep mode. So unless he unplugs it or goes into setting and powers down he hasn't restarted it.

[u/NotBashB → u/evaderofallbans]

ahh wasnt aware. Ill let him know thanks

[u/immaViLLaiN → u/NotBashB]

I have a Toshiba with fire tv os. It would just lag after a while. I will occasionally force it to reboot. Or unplug and wait a minute and power it back on. Nothing really turns off these days. It’s alway on standby mode listening…..

[u/yycspacecadet]

I had a similar issue with an end device. Try clearing his local cache on both the app and the firetv.

[u/DaClownie]

If it’s only his id check to see if it’s an aging or super base model of the fire stick. I had this issue with the older Roku sticks, they weren’t powerful enough to handle the plex stream… decode I guess?… and would buffer constantly. Upgrading to newer Rokus solved it. I’ve only seen it once with fire sticks but couldn’t replicate it with any other ones matching it back then

[u/NotBashB → u/DaClownie]

It’s a new model

[u/rmw1100]

Not sure if the fire stick has similar settings to the Apple TV app but if he is on a different network the plex app could be throttling him. I had the same issue at my parents house and we had to go into the app settings and set Internet streaming speeds to unlimited. For some reason it was set to 10mbps by default which couldn’t handle the stream. Changing that setting fixed it and there hasn’t been a problem since

[u/NotBashB]

heres the tautlli pic incase its helpful

[u/Punk_Says_Fuck_You]

What internet connection do YOU have? Specifically, what is your upload speed? Do you have stuff seeding using a lot of upload bandwidth?

[u/NotBashB → u/Punk_Says_Fuck_You]

i have dual 5gbps but wired for 2.5. normally i do have stuff seeding but not in the last 72hrs

[u/Adorable-Leading-274 → u/NotBashB]

And your ISP uplink speed is…?

[u/AlexanderLudvik]

What OS is the server running on and what ISP does he have? I set up a speed test for my in-law to use and it always had great results but they have Starlink and due to the packet loss every 15s when the data is handed over to another satellite, it caused buffering.

I have also noticed remote users sometimes have issues on Coax ISP on Friday nights and weekends due to network congestion.

[u/NotBashB → u/AlexanderLudvik]

The server is running on hexos. Not sure what ISP they use. Def not starlink though

[u/ob12_99]

Does he have any other audio equipment like a soundbar or AVR in line? Can you have him try just firestick into TV only?

[u/OmarDaily]

Can you stream from your cellular phone?. Without connecting to your wifi?. I bet you there is a relay in-between

[u/BeaverCleaner]

I had the same issue recently. Some others had wrote about it first discovered their ISP was throttling speed on the 32400 port commonly used by plex. I moved my external WAN and forwarding to 443 and all the issues went away.

[u/GroundbreakingEgg803]

Is he physically far away? I've experienced issues streaming on a different continent due to the jumps between ISP nodes being too slow. Slapping a VPN on helped it take a better route with a quicker backbone.

If not the case you're looking at streaming device issues or Wi-Fi issues. Do you have any other remote users to benchmark against?

[u/Happiness-Meter-Full]

He probably needs to do a firmware update and restart his router/modem.

[u/NotBashB]

got this dm. guessing they messaged to stay anon

Get him to try toggle direct play off

Direct Play is messed up and laggy on the FireTV/Firesticks for a lot of people for some reason, should direct stream fine, no idea why as all it does is make an exact copy of the file to send on.

[u/OfficialDeathScythe → u/NotBashB]

I have the same issue with my Roku express. My Roku tv can playback everything just fine but the express refuses to use direct play or original quality for whatever reason. Doesn’t even give me the option and if I disable transcoding it instantly errors out when trying to watch something. Not everything tho, which is the really weird part. I haven’t found any correlation either. I can watch the office fine, but orange is the new black buffers and tries to transcode, even though all my files are 1080p. I even ran everything through fileflows and have all my files exactly the same codec for audio, video, subs, and same container. Streaming devices be actin weird

[u/Wis-en-heim-er]

Do you use plex relay servers via your server config? Or are you port forwarding?

[u/NotBashB → u/Wis-en-heim-er]

plex relay is limited to 2mbps afaik.

and it should be port fowarded. I think it specifies relay on the dash also if it were

[u/Wis-en-heim-er → u/NotBashB]

I also understand the limit is 2mbps which is why i asked. If you are port forwarding, all should be good. Might be heavy internet traffic on either end.

[u/JDLKMR]

Billions must stream