Recently, I’ve been adding some HD Blu-ray quality videos at 1080p to my Plex library. I’ve noticed that these videos have been stopping frequently to buffer during playback. When I check the Plex dashboard, I notice that the video and audio are “Direct Playing” which normally, is great to prevent less stress on the CPU but in my case, causes too much buffering for my liking. Everything 720p and below plays smoothly in Direct Play but what I would like to know is if I’m able to force Plex to transcode all 1080p videos and retain the HD quality. I’m okay with making my CPU doing the extra work.
Right now, I set my 1080p videos to transcode to 720p… but I’m losing out on quality this way.
Turning off the option to “Play smaller videos at original quality” doesn’t work either.
Are we talking about local playback or remote?
Which clients are you using? Are they wired or wireless?
Is your server connected per WiFi or wireless?
Is you media file storage internal, in the local network or remote?
Ideally you don’t want them to transcode, as transcoding will reduce quality, pretty much no matter what, even if you perform it ahead of time (this can be mitigated though). However, if you’re buffering on a Direct Play, then that means your network is not fast enough to sustain the bitrate of the BluRay most likely. This could be easily fixed with a faster network/better wifi/going hardwired. Unless you’re remote streaming in which case you’re limited by your ISP’s upload bandwidth and receiving devices download bandwidth.
If you want to put in the work ahead of time, you can try using handbrake to put them into x265, if you use constant quality the recommended setting is 22 or 23, but for a bit more control, you can use Variable Bitrate, set that to what your network is capable of (or just below), and see if you like the results.
My setup is wired (1gbit) and local with videos playing from a network storage. I’ve tried on several clients. Nvidia Shield, Amazon Firestick, Roku and even the Plex Web Client Player all play the same way with constant buffering.
It’s strange because VLC and MXPlayer has no issue playing back these videos. I did look a bit into hand brake but to manually convert over 50 videos seems like quite the chore.
I feel something is up with the Plex Media Player since I’ve seen similar posts to mine
To be honest, if this was the case, A LOT more people would be complaining… a Wired Gigabit connection, should be more than enough to direct play some 1080p BluRay rips straight from the BluRay without compression. However, (and I am not sure if they’ve fixed it) there at least was a bug with Nvidia Shield and VC-1 content not long ago, so I would double check that they’re still “Direct Play” and not “Transcoding” when you play via the Shield…
If that’s been fixed, and you’re still running into issues, you’re going to have to share your logs from your playback attempts.
Turn on Logging, turn off Verbose.
Shut down Plex Media Server
Start Plex Media Server
Wait about 5-10 minutes
Attempt Playback on device
Wait for issue to occur.
After issue has occurred, stop playback
Wait another 2 minutes
Download the log file from PMS and share here.
Also provide the PMS Version Number, and the Playback App Version Number.
Additional App logs may be helpful as well depending on the client being used.
Yea, I just figured out the problem. I have a 6tb Seagate External USB3.0 Hard Drive that is connected to my Asus RT-AC86U router. Even though this is a decent router and was fully compatible with the hard drive, it seems playing HD videos directly from it via the router has it’s limitations. The router only has 512GB of RAM and noticed it was using 95% of it’s capacity.
So I did a quick test, threw my HD videos onto my PC’s hard drive, updated my libraries and played use the Plex Video Player on all my streaming devices. They all seem to play the 1080p videos smoothly now without the constant buffering. I’ll just attach any storage devices to the PC instead of the router. I tried cheaping out instead of using a NAS since it’s something I can’t afford at the moment. Good lesson learned.
