Server Version#: 1.25.5.5492-12f6b8c83
Player Version#: 5.32.1
I am new to the world of PLEX. I’m almost loving it, but I am experiencing playback issues on my Xbox One X. I have a collection of about 200 movies. I’ve ripped them ‘bit perfect’. Here are some details…
They are all in .mkv containers. HD material in H.264 and UHD in H.265. I include the main movie, 1 or 2 subtitles tracks, a chapters file, and the highest quality audio track available from my rip of the disk (often this is DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD).
The .mkv files are stored on a qnap TS-453D with three 8G Samsung SSDs in RAID 5. The QNAP is NOT the Plex Server.
PLEX server is running on a windows 10 i5-8400 machine with 8G RAM. The QNAP is a network folder on the PC.
The PLEX client is on an Xbox One X.
All hardware is connected via hardwired 1GbE.
When I play files I see many artifacts (I’m not sure the technical term to describe them). With H.264, the movie will play fine for a while, then experience periodic ‘horizontal tearing’ of the video. This will usually resolve itself after several seconds. When I play H.265, the movie will play fine, then suddenly stop completely to a black screen. I need to stop playback and restart and I’m ok for 20 - 30 minutes until it happens again.
I have tried to avoid transcoding. I have setup for both direct play and direct stream. In all cases I can confirm on the PLEX server that direct play is being used. I have audio passthrough setup on the Xbox One X and can confirm my Anthem AVM60 processor that the audio stream is coming through as expected.
However, if I check the ‘disable video stream transcoding’ the video will not play (which surprises me since it works with direct play) (This occurred with the H.265 file, I haven’t confirmed with H.264).
I’m concluding I don’t understand the impact of transcoding and I’m not sure what to do.
While reading about the features of PLEX Pass, I’m seeing it enables hardware transcoding… maybe this will help, but I’m still not sure what transcoding is occurring in my setup.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
