Roku update 12.5 broke the Plex app
My Roku updated today and it’s now very slow. Plex is almost unusable even streaming from our local server. Has anyone else seen this issue?
Forum Discussion
Hi TulsaTV,
Thank you for informing us!
Currently, our appropriate Roku team is still investigating this issue that you're experiencing.
We sincerely appreciate your understanding and patience.
Kind regards,
John
Here is a detailed response from Plex employee "ljunkie" today:
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sorry, everyone, for the delayed response! We have been investigating the issue and have isolated this to some changes in the Roku 12.5 OS update, specifically memory issues with MPEG2 streams in an HLS container. Roku enforces apps to use up to ~300MB of memory. Once an app goes over the threshold, Roku will terminate the app, which is what we are running into while direct streaming MPEG2 with a resolution of 1080. Lower resolutions are not immediately affected. However, those streams use much more memory in this scenario than they should. We are looking to see if we can do anything to limit the memory usage, but this may be something that needs an OS update/fix from Roku. The playback stack and memory management are part of Roku’s OS, which developers cannot tune or modify.
In the meantime, to work around the issue, we will turn off direct streaming of MPEG2 if the resolution is over 720p. While the “Allow MPEG2” setting is not technically supported, you can still benefit by enabling it for resolutions lower than 1080p. If the Live TV channel is 1080p, the setting is ignored and will require a transcode to convert from MPEG to H264 (essentially, what happens with the setting disabled). We will be publishing a preview update shortly and plan to include this change in the next official release.
This is a fantastic update, thank you so much!!!
- This may be a fix from Plex. Again from Plex employee ljunkie:
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Hey all. We are about to ship another preview release that may have a fix for the issue. We have opted to make this an experimental setting and it’s attached to the “Allow MPEG2” option. When “Allow MPEG2” is enabled, you’ll see another sub option named “Experimental 1080p MPEG2”. This sub option will allow direct streaming resolutions up to 1080p (again), but it should hopefully fix the memory issue. Without going into too much detail, we have found that using a different container to deliver the stream won’t exhaust the memory during playback. We’ll continue to test this on our end, however, we want to get this out sooner than later to ensure you all have a better experience! Please give that option a try and let us know if the channel exits stop. I’ll update this thread when the preview version is ready.
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And:
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We’ve released an update to the Plex preview channel - 7.12.4 FIXES: Video: add user preference to allow direct streaming 1080p MPEG2.
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Update: it worked for me!
This also works for me on my Roku Ultra
THANK YOU!
Jim
"Experimental 1080p MPEG2”. This sub option will allow direct streaming resolutions up to 1080p (again), but it should hopefully fix the memory issue. Without going into too much detail, we have found that using a different container to deliver the stream won’t exhaust the memory during playback."
I can also confirm this update is working fine on my Roku TCL 4K TV and mpeg2 is no longer transcoded and also no longer crashes.
