I just edited this post because it was about 1000 words long and I was ranting. Just don’t know how I can get Plex to work without issues from transcoder, network, tuner/dvr, etc.
Done.
edit: it is trouble shooting 101, attempt to narrow down what the specific issue is, start with one thing at a time, resolve that and see what else may not be working
well, whatever the issue, is very likely something specific to your setup (the pc, or network, or the way it is all configured), because while certainly people have problems, it pretty much just works for everyone else.
since plex is a client portion and a server portion, it works entirely different than just playing a file with VLC or kodi or other media player.
if you want help, you need to provide details and specifics, an i5 from 10 years ago is probably not be helpful for a lot of transcoding, and different model cpus have different functionality for iGPU transcoding.
There are a number of ways you can help your self, but monitoring the plex server status page while trying to stream something, there is the server alerts section, and for nitty gritty details there is the console log window where you can watch the raw log messages go by and look for any errors or status that looks wrong or whatever.
Sorry to hear about your problems and frustrations.
Just as a counter point, I run Plex Server on my QNAP NAS and use a Shield TV as my Plex client, along with Roku’s, etc.
Very seldom ,if ever, do I encounter playback issues let alone the ones you are talking about.
The only occasional issue I will see is related to garbled DVR recordings every once and while due to signal strength issues on my OTA antenna into my HD HomeRun.
I will see some occasional spinning (related to caching) on my Roku due to the reduce horsepower on them vs. my Shield TV.
I know the most recent server update today had a couple Windows fixes, but occasionally some of the issues are caused by MS changes as well. Doesn’t make them any less painful, but sometimes things are out of Plex’s control.
Anyway, if you would like to provide server and client debug logs, we can try and get the your specific issues resolved/addressed.
Also I would be careful on assuming everyone who has the same error message is always being caused by the same root cause.
