@markmarz said:
I’d still like to know why Plex isn’t transcoding the video
How do you know it is not transcoding?
Take a look at Status - NowPlaying to get detail info
Or maybe as far as he’s concerned, I haven’t reached the limit even though there’s heavy buffering. But when I set the remote stream bitrate to 4 Mpbs 720p there was still buffering and very low CPU usage. Mystery on top of mystery.
Buffering not only occurs because of low available bandwidth.
Often, the roundtrip delay time is the limiting factor. When a file is transcoded and played, it is chopped into little packets. All of these packets get transferred individually over the network. When you have a particularly long roundtrip delay, the ‘acknowledge’ packets travel with too much of a delay, so the folllowing packets are sent too late by the server.
Although geographic distance is a factor as well,
a long roundtrip delay occurs often when traffic has to cross several ISPs networks. It very much depends on the interconnectivity of the involved ISPs and whether they have direct peering agreements with each other or are using intermediate network of other ISPs.
Each network ‘hop’ adds to the roundtrip delay.
These circumstances are the reason why professional video providers (Netflix. Hulu, Youtube…) have their content mirrored to several datacenters over the world.
When you play something from them, you are being (unnoticed) redirected to the datacenter which is suited best to achieve the lowest count of hops and the ‘shortest’ route to you .
A private person running Plex cannot do something like that.
