Ok, I am just starting out as I just got a smart TV (the AQUOS 4T-C50AN1).
It has Android TV built in, so I downloaded Plex off of the android store, have my Plex Media Server running on my home computer over a 1GB connection. The TV only has a 10/100 ethernet port but does have wifi too (all are connected).
Now, when I go to play a movie… I keep getting errors about my internet speed.
All of this is internal (within the home, no outside access) so there should not be any type of network speed shortage but I just can’t figure it out.
As I am new to this, I’m hoping someone will have some suggestions that I can try out to get things running correctly.
Many times that error message means the video is being transcoded and your server is not powerful enough to transcode in real time.
Short set of questions:
Q1: Video or audio transcoding? See Plex Dashboard -> Now Playing. Look at example for The Princess Bride.
Q1: Did you have subtitles enabled? If so, turn them off. They’re known troublemakers. Any better?
Q2: Choose an AC3 (Dolby Digital) or AAC audio format if possible. Avoid TrueHD, as it will transcode.
With Android TV devices, if the audio is transcoding and subtitles are enabled, then the video transcodes as well. When this happens your CPU generally goes to 100%, your fans sound like a leaf blower, and the video can buffer/stutter.
Here’s the long set of questions / suggestions. Answer which ones you can and we’ll figure it out. Some redundant to above…
Check the settings in the Plex app on your TV. In Video Quality section, set Adjust Automatically = Off and Home Streaming = Maximum.
What is your server platform? Linux/Windows/etc? CPU?
Does anything play OK? SD/480p movies / 1080p movies / 4K movies?
For testing purposes, play a movie with Dolby Digital audio and subtitles turned off:
Here is what I have found out so far.
Running my video through the TV using the VLC app (with DLNA on with the Plex Media Server) and the 4k video runs fine, through Kodi using the Plex plugin, same stuttering issue as with Kodi player itself.
I disabled video stream encoding and now it plays through Plex and Kodi w/ the plugin but what is weird is both why it would re-encode a compatible video and why would my 8 core/16 thread cpu with 32gb of ram and a 1080ti on a 1GB connection not be able to transcode?
I checked cpu usage and it was at maybe 10% so it looks like PMS wasn’t even doing anything.
Am I missing some other setting/optimization somewhere?
