My friend’s 4K 5th gen AppleTV plays movie at very slow speed. He downloaded the Plex app a few days ago so he has the latest version.
So here’s the setup.
My movies are on a NAS server. I have 400 mbps internet speed. I have an i5 NUC pc running Plex. When I watch at home where the NAS server is located, these are:
My Technical Details:
Source: Transcode
Quality: 1920 x 1080 @ 31 Mbps (some movies even get 70+ Mbps)
Video: copy(H264)
Audio: Transcode (AAC - AAC)
Player: AVPlayer. The Enhanced Video Player cannot be used when Automatically Adjust Quality is enabled
Transcode Reason: App cannot direct play this item. No direct play video profile exists for protocol http, with container mkv, and video codec h264.
My friends place:
Internet connection speed: 160 Mbps
These are his Technical Details:
Source: Transcode
Quality: 720 x 405 @ 1.9 Mbps
Video: Transcode(H264-H264)
Audio: Transcode (OPUS - OPUS)
Player: mpv
Transcode Reason: Not enough bandwidth for direct play of this item. Required bandwidth is 39100kbps and only 2000kbps is available.
I told him on the left panel of his AppleTV Plex app, go Settings, Video Quality, change Internet Steaming speed to 20 Mbps, 1080 HD and Auto Adjust Quality to Off and he is still watching my 1080p movies at a 720p resolution.
His internet speed is fast enough. So what can he do to fix this low resolution problem?
Check your remote access settings.
If it’s not properly setup Plex will fallback to a relayed / indirect connection. Those relays will limit your bandwidth to 2 Mbps (1 Mbps without Plex Pass).
Edit:
another possible cause could be the video quality settings on the device used by your friend… if they set a limit to the remote video quality, they can be causing this limitation as well.
Here’s my Remote Access Settings. My friend isn’t home to play a movie so I can’t see his playback details. So what should I change in my Remote Access Settings?
The now-playing tile shows that the playback is indeed running through a relay server of Plex because it cannot establish a direct connection. That means there’s something wrong with the remote access setup – this can range from an issue in your Plex configuration over the setup of your router down to an issue with your ISP.
The troubleshooting article linked above is a good starting point to double-check this setup.
If the automatic configuration is causing you trouble I tend to prefer establishing a manual port forward on your router (you can find a link explaining the basics of that in the troubleshooting support article). This will basically tell the router which requests from the outside to forward to your Plex Media Server – some use the same port used internally by Plex, I prefer using a different port number (“security by obscurity”… which isn’t adding much but it gives me a better feeling). After establishing that port forward, make sure to set the checkbox in the Plex remote access settings and tell Plex the port you specified.
