"Buffering..." got you down? Read here.

I need Your help. Yes You with the files that play on all other devices but not your PS3/PS4. Also You seeing buffering of on ultra gigaMegaULTRABIT network. And You with the wireless access point is sitting on top of the PSX. And especially You who flirted with 20Mbps quality a couple times, got burned and went back to 8Mbps, saw more problems (why me? why?!) and are now desolate in the gutter with other lowly Mbps. Rally with me ladies, gentlemen, and canine!
 
Here's what I know of "Buffering...":

• At about 50% of the way through playback of a movie the PlayStation 3 and 4 sometimes get "stuck". Customers are needing to exit and resume playback.
  • We've reproduced this ourselves and are working to isolate the issue. 
• The PS3/4 (4 especially) is computationally fast enough to handle higher bitrate media but the memory available for buffering is too low. This is the primary cause of "Buffering..." in my estimation.
  • If you're playing at too high a quality, you're gonna have to turn the quality down.
  • A NAS may not have the horsepower to transcode / remux streams for PS3/4 depending on the source material.
• I'm concerned with you seeing buffering on <= 8Mbps videos. Similar issues we've run into on other platforms are usually caused by a system library which wasn't written or isn't configured to work with enough media format disparity.
  • The only way we'll fix this is to be able to identify commonalities and reproduce the issue.

That last bit is huge. Plex customers, I need posts with actionable data.
 
When you have a problem with playback stopping/starting/buffering unusually, please post:

• The XML media information for the library item you tried to play
• Playing locally? What was the selected local quality?
• Playing remotely? What was the selected remote quality?
• Which audio stream were you listening too?
• Does the bad behavior happen on all videos some of the time?
• Or, some videos all of the time?
• Are the problematic videos mostly MP4/M4V?

If you want serious, I mean serious, bonus points consider:

• Generating a 5 minute sample of a video which shows the problem. Add this sample back to your library and give it a test play on the PS3/4. If the same problem exists then (EUREKA!) send me a private message. We can figure out a way to get the file from you. Sample files which reproduce the problem are worth double their bytes in gold.

I have had complaints of buffering on <8mbps files across multiple PS4 systems on different internet connections. Most of my media doesn’t exceed average bitrate of 3.5mbps.

I can attribute this to Plex forcing a transcode on a NAS that can’t handle necessarily handle it in the amount that’s being asked of it, but the fact of the matter is it should not be forcing a transcode…

I’ve narrowed this down to the CLIENT requesting L4.0 when my files are L4.2…

I think Plex should update the app to select h.264 level 4.2 BY DEFAULT. Even the Playstation 4 documentation says that it supports High@4.2 for the classic playstation 4 model. Every client I’ve looked at has h.264 level 4.0 set as default which forces a transcode. Is there a reason that 4.0 is default when 4.2 is supported according to the documentation?

PS4 Pro are defaulted to h.264 level 5.1 and are not affected by this, but the PS4 documentation also says the highest available profile is 5.2 for the Pro model so it’s the same difference, I suppose.

I have to direct users to change their maximum h.264 profile via the settings (which it warns can cause issues) when in reality it would seem this shouldn’t need to be changed at all to comply with 4.2 files when the client documentation supposedly plays 4.2.

I can confirm this is an issue on local play if I set the Plex client to h.264 level 4.0 on a Pro PS4, it forces the server to transcode h.264 level 4.2 files.

https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/videos/mp_format_v.html

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