PMP stops sending status (Windows)

[avie]

I am using the Plex api to get status info from the player. Once I initiate the ../timeline/subscribe/... it works great for several hours, but invariably status messages stop coming back and further requests to subscribe never result in new status messages. If I restart the player then it works again. And yes, I keep sending the subscribe requests every 60 seconds or so.

Seen this on the Windows player, haven't tested others.

[mseeley]

Hi @avie, do you have a repro case or more details steps to reproduce that we can work from?

[avie]

I've built a remote control which sets up a TCP listener on a port that is specified in the subscribe command. Generally it works great and I use the status messages to provide a progress counter as feedback. However, every so often it will just randomly stop getting updates. Like right in the middle of a movie playback. I notice the remote has stopped updating and if I manually send a subscribe command to the player it is clear no more messages are coming back (I also manually set up a listener ready to accept the status messages but it is never contacted). On the other hand, if I restart the player then messages continue just fine even without restarting the "remote." It just picks up where it left off after it sends it's next subscribe command. Does that help?

If you simply try to have a listener receive status messages for several hours I think you will see it fail. You need to play playing content though. I usually see it fail after 4-6 hours of content, although that playback may be spread over many days and multiple pieces of content.

Let me know if there is additional info I might be able to get from the player when it is in this state to help debug.

[avie]

A little more info that might help. The frequency of this problem seems to be affected by the bandwidth of the content being played. The higher the bandwidth the more likely (quicker) it happens. So if I am streaming some low bandwidth content it works fine for a couple of hours (it will still eventually fail). But if I watch high bandwidth content it fails quickly, e.g. 15-30 minutes. For me, this happens most when the Plex server is sending reasonably high bandwidth video along with 6 channels of PCM. It's almost as if the status messages gets screwed up by the bandwidth being consumed by the client only to never recover.