Hi Community,
I've been using Plex on various devices for quite a while now and generally very happy with the platform. But now I have an issue I don't know how to resolve. I must point out I am quite tech-savvy and adept in networking and streaming, as it is my profession too.
Now on the problem - I currently live and work in London, UK and I have a Synology server set up back home (Eastern Europe). The server is very powerful and does transcoding and streaming tasks without any issue to my phone and laptop, through a dedicated Plex client or through the web interface. The server is hooked up with a 100/40 fiber optic connection which performs quite good. On my end I am on Virgin 100 mbps connection which is also mostly very good. Like I said, I have no trouble streaming almost any bitrate/format movie/series with or without transcoding to any of my devices except for the Plex client on my nVidia Shield TV. Both are latest FW/version and all the settings are checked and set up properly. However, watching even low bitrate 720p content is a struggle on the Shield - the playback starts and through Synology's monitoring app I can see the upstream on the server starts jumping up and down with peaks of up to 4MB/s and lows of BITES per second. For couple of minutes the playback is smooth and then starts stuttering and the client constantly notifies me that my connection to the server is not fast enough. From this point on the upstream does not go above 100-200 KB/s. When I stop the playback and start it again this process repeats. I even experimented streaming the same file to my laptop watching it through Plex Server web interface and the Shield client at the same time - the Shield stutters, while the laptop is playing back fluently. Both devices are on 1Gbps LAN hooked directly into the the Virgin OnHub2. The CPU on the server averages at 5-10% and while streaming to anything but the Shield, the upstream is stable and corresponds to the bitrate of the playback.
I did an audit of my entire setup, and checked all the endpoints' connectivity and settings and I am almost 100% sure there is no problem there. An since only nVidia Shield TV's client has problems I must conclude it has to be an app issue,
Any help or suggestions are welcome.