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…

  • @kometesEnglish
    12•16 days ago

    Jellyfin is your friend…

      • Treedrake
        3•16 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

        • TipponOPEnglish
          1•16 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
            3•15 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.

            • TipponOPEnglish
              1•14 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.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•15 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.

            • TipponOPEnglish
              2•15 days ago

              I hadn’t heard of that. I’ll check it out, thanks :)