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Sonos Won't Stream From Plex If It's Upload Speed is Set

  • 26 November 2023
  • 10 replies
  • 360 views

Hello,

I’ve seen some complaints about this but I wasn’t sure who’s end it was on. It seems that Plex sees Sonos as requiring a very high bitrate and won’t play, even locally. Plex plays fine if you try another way to play it so why even have a Plex integration in Sonos?

You can work around this by not setting an upload speed in Plex but that can have other consequences as music isn’t really the main concern of maxing out your upload speed. Will is already plans for this to be fixed? Is this on Plex or Sonos to resolve? 

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10 replies

jgatie

It's on Plex.

Ken_Griffiths

@manofoz 

If you mean the upload settings here on its server… (see attached). Then it works for me through the Sonos App. I set it to 21 & 40Mbps and it still plays without issue, or are you referring to another setting?

2 Attachments
M

@manofoz 

If you mean the upload settings here on its server… (see attached). Then it works for me through the Sonos App. I set it to 21 & 40Mbps and it still plays without issue, or are you referring to another setting?

Yes I mean the upload speed of the server, I’ll attach mine but it was set to 200 Mbps and I was able to play two songs from a playlist and then it mysteriously stopped playing and when I looked at it it was stopped at the first song in the playlist. Watching the phone I tried playing the third song and the Sonos app quickly skipped over every song saying the server was unavailable, but it still was able to play the first two. Some quick googling and I people were saying that Plex thinks Sonos is like 10Gbps or something and you need to set the upload speed to 0, which is no limit, for it to work. When I set mine to 0 it played all of the songs in the playlist without issue. However, I can’t keep it at zero since I have very limited upload speed and a handful of remote users who all have it set to automatically adjust quality. I have not looked deeply into how Plex uses this setting but I don’t think I should have to lie to Plex just to get Sonos to work.  

I use Plexamp all the time and it works flawlessly. It’s too bad that can’t cast to devices like Spotify can. 

M

It's on Plex.

Ah I was afraid of that. We’re probably screwed then as their customer support pretty much doesn’t exist, the only way to report issues  is on the community forums. For a paid service you’d expect more but they are busy bloating it with things people didn’t ask for that introduce bugs.

I have not dealt with customer support for Sonos yet but I just paid them incredibly more than I’ve paid Plex (Lifetime passes are pretty cheap) so I’d hope it’s a bit better. Can’t complain too much about Plex given how cheap it is for how much use I get out of it but I’ve had some issues that I had clear as day evidence in the logs for and my bug report just turned into a rant form all these other people about how they had the same issue and nobody cared to address it… 

106rallye
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Did you contact Plex about this?

M

Did you contact Plex about this?

I can but there’s not really anyone to contact. They have community forums where people can report issues but it’s likely nobody from Plex will reply.

From what I read before it sounded like Sonos was reporting to Plex that it needed higher upload speeds than the server supported IF you configured your upload speed to something that wasn’t 0, which I guess is unlimited. That sounded more of a Sonos thing than Plex so I figured I’d start here. I can confirm that setting it to 0 lets Sonos play music from Plex but it’s not a fix because I don’t want my server thinking it has more bandwidth for remote streams than it really does.

I might not even need Plex in the middle if I can expose the music in another way that Sonos likes but I’m not sure what will happen to the playlists. The speakers and the server hosting the music will always be on the same local network. 

Ken_Griffiths

My internet upload speed has been set to 21Mbps ever since I’ve run Plex, as that was the upload speed I was getting back in the day from a speedtest check with my ISP - that said my ISP has changed it in recent months to 100Mbps - so I actually will go onto increase that setting now - but just to say I’ve not seen any issues from that setting. All has been working fine here.

edit: Speedtest gives me 109Mbps upload - so I’ve set Plex to that and will report back if I encounter any issues with it.

1 Attachment
Ken_Griffiths

Quick update - Having changed the mentioned upload settings to 109Mbps on the Plex Server - I rebooted the server (just for good measure) and have since gone onto play two albums via the Sonos App/Plex Service - Genesis ‘Trick of the Tail’ and ‘Wind & Wuthering’. All tracks on both albums played without issue - so all seems fine with that Plex upload setting.

M

Quick update - Having changed the mentioned upload settings to 109Mbps on the Plex Server - I rebooted the server (just for good measure) and have since gone onto play two albums via the Sonos App/Plex Service - Genesis ‘Trick of the Tail’ and ‘Wind & Wuthering’. All tracks on both albums played without issue - so all seems fine with that Plex upload setting.

Interesting. I am able to play some songs but others just get skipped right over and an error message quickly passes by, I’ll try to capture what it says tomorrow but it was something that lead me to believe the server was unavailable. Simply changing the upload setting to 0, from 200, and clicking save stopped that from happening. I’ll try a few more songs tomorrow too. 

Ken_Griffiths

Interesting. I am able to play some songs but others just get skipped right over and an error message quickly passes by, I’ll try to capture what it says tomorrow but it was something that lead me to believe the server was unavailable. Simply changing the upload setting to 0, from 200, and clicking save stopped that from happening. I’ll try a few more songs tomorrow too. 

FWIW - The Plex server in my case is a wired 64-Bit NAS and my ISP d/l is 1GB/s and u/l 100MB/s. Plex Server version is 1.32.7.7621 (shows as latest update).

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