It's just taken me 55 minutes to watch a 35 minute episode on Plex because of crashes - eviltoast

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…

  • Treedrake@fedia.io
    3·
    3 days ago

    I’d recommend running Jellyfin server but using Kodi as your frontend, best of both worlds, especially if you use subtitles as subtitles still work really poorly on Jellyfin

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I used to run Kodi, but I moved away from it a few years ago. I can’t remember why off the top of my head, so I’ll have to look into it and see what turned me off it.

      • Treedrake@fedia.io
        3·
        3 days ago

        It’s definitely not as lightweight, but as I rely on subtitles a lot I have to run most stuff through Kodi unfortunately. I find it to work quite well though with the Jellyfin add-on. I don’t know if it’s because the development of Jellyfin is mostly done in the US, who often dislike subtitles, but this has been an ongoing issue for years at this point.

        • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          I use Radarr to process my videos, and I’m sure I’ve got a plugin or script somewhere to download subtitles. I’d forgotten all about it since I’ve been using Plex, so I’ll have to try to remember what it is.

      • charade_you_are@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        There’s also a client called Jellyfin Media Player that works pretty well. I tried Kodi one time and really couldn’t stand it. Felt so cluttered and clunky to me.