Hi, just looking to see if anyone else has experienced heavy pixelation recently?
I’m experiencing heavy pixelation on 480P MKV content when using Plex on my PC (which is acting as my server) and each of my Rokus. 1080P content plays just fine with no issue, and my Nvidia Shield is not experiencing any pixelation issues.
I haven’t changed any of my settings, my version of Plex is up to date, and each of my devices are wired to a network switch and also up to date. The only thing that I noticed is that when the 480P MKVs are played on PC or Roku, they are being transcoded. When they are played on Nvidia Shield, it is direct play. This leads me to believe that the transcoding may be the issue.
Alright, just an update with a solution (I think?), for anyone who runs into a similar issue.
After some reading and some playing with settings, I turned off hardware-accelerated transcoding, and that appears to have fixed the problem. The article linked below lead me to try this.
There are some drawbacks to Hardware-Accelerated Streaming:
The output quality of video may be lower, appearing slightly more blurry or blocky. This is especially true and more noticeable when streaming at resolutions below 720p or when using lower bit rate source material. (Hardware-accelerated video encoders are faster, but provide lower-quality output than software encoders are capable of.)*
What I still don’t understand is what changed recently to cause this problem. I’ve used Plex for years with the hardware-accelerated transcoding option turned on, and things were just fine.
Other options I considered to resolve this issue was to re-encode my entire library to h.264 or to toss the Rokus in favor of something that could direct play the content.
