I’m new here and intend to read to learn more. But I’ve been at this for two weeks, watching videos and making upgrades, and I still can’t stream a recorded video that’s watchable.
I started with a Dell 7010 basic box (4GB, 250HDD), which has an i5-3470 in it (Passmark 6600 or so). I added an SSD and put my transcode/cache location in a directory there, and I upgraded my single-stick 4GB to 16GB (dual 8s). I’m still having the same problems across multiple Android and Windows, both LAN and internet.
I play a show and it takes forever to start, then it pauses every 10 seconds for a couple seconds (if I’m lucky) before starting again, pausing, etc.
I’m hoping there’s some universal configuration boo boo that I’m just not aware of yet, a magic switch that’ll fix my problem. I just want a single stream, there’s plenty of power here for that.
I’m also an IT pro and have tried many configuration changes before writing here, but please recommend away.
Oh and I also bought a Gigabyte 1030 video card and enabled hardware acceleration. It’s not super-powerful but it runs on the power supply and it is being utilized by Plex.
It sounds like your media is transcoding. You need to find out why that is happening and see if it can be avoided. The goal should be to Direct Play all your media, at least locally, and only transcode when necessary. Direct Playing requires very little CPU (ex: I direct play 4K media running PMS on my Celeron based Synology NAS).
Let’s start with the local clients. What are you using - FireTV, Nvidia Shield, Smart TV app, something else?
How are things connected? Is a streaming stick plugged into a TV, to a receiver, something else?
Example (my setup): Nvidia Shield <–HDMI–> Denon AVR-X4300H <–HDMI–> LG 4K B7 OLED
How is your network configured? Static IP for PMS system? Connected via Ethernet cable to switch/router? How are clients attached - wired or wireless?
When playing a problematic video, login to your Plex Server with a web browser. What is shown in Status -> Now Playing? Direct Play / Direct Stream / Transcoding?
If you’ve Android TV clients, in the Plex app settings, set Display Information = On. During playback, pull up the on-screen controls (pause, etc). Look in upper left corner. It will tell you if the media is Direct Playing, Direct Streaming, or Transcoding, and give a reason if one of the latter two. What does it say?
Lastly, please pull the Plex XML information for video you used for the steps above. Please attach it to your reply (you might have to zip the file before it will attach).
Almost forgot - on Windows PCs and Macs, strongly suggest you use Plex Media Player for playback. PMP is a very full featured client. It does not have the audio & video limitations of web browsers. PMP will direct play most audio & video formats supported by Plex. This will reduce transcoding and the associated load on your server. Also stay away from the Plex client in the Windows store. PMP is a better client.
Here’s each of the items you inquired about . Thanks for taking a look.
Let me clarify here for a second. Direct-play-only is fine if you’re trying to get an underpowered server up and running. Based on Plex topic videos I’ve seen recently, this rig should handle 4-6 transcodes easily. I only intend to use it for myself, i.e. single stream. I have it set for 8Mb/s local, forcing it to transcode. If it can’t do that then it isn’t working yet.
Also for wifi mentioned below, I’d like to narrow the focus and skip that until I have the wired stuff working normally.
I am using the dedicated player installed on Windows as you suggested.
What operating system & distribution / version - Linux / Windows / etc?
Windows 7 SP1 (v6.1 build 7601)
What version of Plex Media Server?
Plex Media Server PC (Windows)
1.14.1.5488-cc260c476
I saw some notifications yesterday, this might have updated overnight.
Let’s start with the local clients. What are you using - FireTV, Nvidia Shield, Smart TV app, something else?
I’m using the player installed on three windows desktops, two Win10 and Win7 on the server itself. Client versions 3.80.1, 3.77.2 and 3.71.1. One of these is remote (at work). I’m also using the Hulu player, which I don’t have access to right now, but this auto-updates. I have a laptop running RemixOS that has the latest Android client on it (as of earlier this week). Normally I’d accept that this app is a non-standard installation and could have a problem, except that it’s occurring universally elsewhere.
How are things connected? Is a streaming stick plugged into a TV, to a receiver, something else?
Hulu is my streaming stick equivalent. The server, Hulu, and windows client are all hard wired on 1Gb. My android laptop is my back yard entertainment and is the only wifi device here, connecting on 5G to a 2300 AC Router.
How is your network configured? Static IP for PMS system? Connected via Ethernet cable to switch/router? How are clients attached - wired or wireless?
PMS is reserved DHCP and the router is port forwarded successfully. The only wireless clients are my entertainment laptop and a couple phones.
Note: I’d like to ignore the wireless elements. The wired clients are not working and I’d like to focus on those as the core problem for now.
When playing a problematic video, … What is shown in Status…?
Watching remotely (Internet), the video hasn’t managed to start yet in the player, but the server says it’s transcoding, as expected.
If you’ve Android TV clients…
None of these.
Lastly, please pull the [video XML information]
I don’t see how to attach that zip. Here’s a paste for now…
“This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.”
Thanks for all the information. Some general comments and items specific to your setup follow.
I don’t understand why you’re forcing the transcode. Hopefully just testing the capabilities of the system. When you use Plex, you should always Direct Play the media if possible. It doesn’t matter if the server has a Celeron or an i9.
Transcoded video & audio will always be at a lower quality than the original source. Transcoding puts a greater strain on your system - CPU/GPU usage, IO activity, etc. This also uses extra power (bad for the monthly AC bill) and extra heat (bad for your system).
There are valid reasons to transcode: client does not support audio/video format; bandwidth limitations such as with mobile clients; working around a Plex bug; and for testing the capabilities of your system.
However, for normal Plex usage, streaming to one client at home, you should always try to direct play the media.
OK. Off my soapbox. On to other stuff.
Step 1: Disable forced transcoding.
What happens when you disable the forced transcoding?
Play the TV episode with Plex Media Player (a) on the same system where PMS is installed, and (b) with PMP on your other Windows system at home.
They should both direct play without buffering.
PMP direct plays MPEG2 video and AC3 audio (same as your 60 Minutes episode). Need to make sure this is working.
While the video is playing, look at your server via Plex Web, and go to Status → Dashboard. What do you see for Now Playing? Click on this thing: off to the right to show detailed info.
You should see something like this screenshot from my system:
Regarding transcoding & NVIDIA consumer cards & the 1030
Transcoding has two parts, decoding the original format then encoding to the target format. Plex currently encodes all video to AVC/H.264 video. Furthermore, Nvidia (not Plex) limits their consumer cards to two simultaneous transcodes. When using an Nvidia card, the third simultaneous transcode will hit the server CPU. It will not used the embedded Intel GPU. Note that all audio transcoding occurs on the CPU.
The 1030 is not a good choice for hardware accelerated transcoding. The 1030 does not support the encoding portion. This means when you transcode that Plex will always use the server CPU for the encode portion.
A 1050 would be a better choice, as it supports both the encode and decode process.
Note that the HD2500 in the i5 also supports hardware acceleration for MPEG2 (decode) and H.264 (decode & encode). It has no H.265 support.
As long as you are playing MPEG2 & H.264 video at 1080p or lower, you would probably be better off pulling the 1030 and using the integrated HD2500 graphics (for one or two streams).
Reference: Desktop 3rd Gen Intel® Core™ Processor Family: Datasheet, Vol. 1 Sec 2.4.1.3 Video Engine “This engine supports Full hardware acceleration for decode of AVC/H.264, VC-1 and MPEG -2 contents along with encode of MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 apart from various video processing features.” Note that Plex does not support accelerated decode of VC-1.
Step 2: Try with transcoding
Repeat step 1. During playback on PCs with PMP, go into playback setting and change quality from Original to 1080p 8Mbps (or whatever setting you desire).
What happens? (it might take a few seconds for PMP to start the transcode & rebuffer).
What does Status → Dashboard → Now Playing show? Is the system using hardware acceleration? If so, you’ll see (hw) (see screenshot below).
What is the CPU utilization? Any audio transcode will be on the CPU. The video encode portion should also be on the CPU given the 1030s limitations.
General Comments
Everything else looks OK. Reserved IP address for server, gigabit network, current versions of PMS & PMP.
Really not sure why you’re getting buffering, even if transcoding. The Celeron in my NAS can transcode 1080p MPEG2 w/o hardware acceleration and not buffer during playback.
As you suggested, let’s work with the wired clients first, then proceed to wireless.
One more question: What is the Hulu player? I’m not familiar. I’ve seen Hulu apps for Roku, etc, but never a Hulu player.
Thanks for all this information, you’ve really put in your time with Plex, I can see that. I absolutely do want to stress this thing out beyond what I expect to need from it on a daily basis. The fact that it’s still performing so badly with these extras means that when it’s actually fixed, it should handle everything I’m throwing at it without a hitch. Then I can go back to direct stream and totally underutilize everything.
The good news is, I found the problem. I had a USB3 drive enclosure that partially failed on me - it was still connected as a drive letter, but its throughput dropped to 10MB/s. Once I replaced that the problem disappeared. If that component had just failed completely, it would have been immediately obvious and I wouldn’t have gone down this road.
After the fix, I tested with 6 transcoding streams without a hiccup. Some were local 8Mb, some were web player and some were remote to my office desktop PMP and web player, with CPU in the 30% range and GPU about 20%.
I really appreciate the time you took to give this a good look, and your assessment that it looked OK really prompted me to go back and re-check each component and ultimately find this failure.
I did read something about the NVIDIA limit on a video where someone was trying to crack it. Since the 1030 is working OK and I actually have tons of headroom for my intended use (which was my goal), I’m just going to leave it alone for now. The 1050 also peaks about 15W higher, which on a prebuilt with a 240W power supply could just be the extra straw. Besides, now that it’s actually working, I could do without the graphics card altogether and still be fine.
There is no Hulu player, that was my brain freeze; it’s a Roku player.
Possible hardware problem never occurred to me. I’ll file that one away for future reference.
I hate partial failures. I recently had a USB drive used for NAS backups take the partial failure path. Would have saved me a lot of troubleshooting time if it had just up and died.
off to the right to show detailed info.
