Server Version#: Version 1.31.1.6733
Player Version#: latest on whatever device. At the moment I’m frozen on NVidia Shield
I’ve had this problem on and off for a long time. I’ve written in the forums before, never got an answer. But I did get more info on the problem.
Some videos play through Plex, while others just get stuck on buffering, sometimes saying the server isn’t strong enough.
I ran into the problem again last night, trying to stream from my server to NVidia Shield Pro (both through ethernet). Looking at the dashboard on the server, there’s very little CPU and/or RAM usage, but bandwidth is well over 700Mbps. So, to me, it looks like it’s transcoding or something on the server before sending it to the NVidia Shield, and hanging on network bandwidth. Many of my other videos play fine, running direct stream, but some give me problems like this.
Pulling up the streaming info on the NVidia Shield, it shows as direct stream and the bandwidth required something like 17Mbps, but I can’t get it to run as direct stream. I also tried going into the Plex player settings and limit the bandwidth to 1080p, but that just made it refuse to open the video at all.
It was late, so I didn’t get into looking at trying to find the other videos that I had problems with (I’m going to start grouping them to see if there’s a similarity). What I did notice from the one that I was having problems with was that it’s an MPEG-4, HEVC. I was pretty sure that NVidia Shield should be able to play MPEG-4 with no problem, though not sure about with Plex. Through my small search last night it seems others have this problem. But I didn’t have enough time to search and troubleshoot thoroughly.
The Plex Dashboard will tell if that is the case. Inspect it.
Immediately after starting playback, it is normal for the bandwidth to jump to maximum, because the client wants to fill its playback buffer as fast as possible. Bandwidth will later drop down as it will only be used to top up the buffer as the player is consuming it.
that did it. That’s awesome. Is that your program?
Will I need to do that with all my mpeg-4 files? or just the ones that act up like that one?
I’m not even sure how that program worked; it didn’t seem to use any CPU or RAM when running.
All it does is taking a chunk of video data and then a chunk of audio data which are intended to be played around the same time. Put them after each other and then go on to the next chunks.
This is called “interleaving” and is pretty much the standard in media files.
So all it takes is some copying of data from the old to the new file. It doesn’t take much computing power to do that, and the resulting file has exactly the same audio and video quality as the source file. There is no quality-degrading transcoding involved.
The defective files you have are not built like this. They have all the video first in them, and then all the audio afterwards. So when playing such a file locally, the player has to jump back and forth all the time between the video and the audio sections of the file.
As long as player can access the file as a whole, this is still manageable. But if you are trying to stream the video, you don’t have the whole file at once available to you. You have always only a small part of it – depending on how much of it fits in the small buffer memory of your playback client. Which means that during playback, the stream is always stopping, then seeking to video or audio portion of the file, reading a bit, then stopping again and seeking to the other part of the file … etc.
This repeated seeking is what causes the excessive bandwidth consumption.
So, I’ve kinda came across a new issue, though I’m not sure if it’s related. I might have to look into it more, or maybe start a new thread.
I lost my entire library, ~50TB worth, and ~$10k in hardware. Pissed is an understatement, but that was a few weeks ago. I’m starting to rebuild my library and I was interested in checking out Dolby Vision. I have a bunch of 4K TVs in my home, but only one plays Dolby Vision. I want to buy a new 4K projector for my theater room, and was looking at the Dolby Vision ones, too. Looking up files, in the past I’ve always grabbed the HRD 10 version. I remember that I couldn’t play anything with DV in it, so I stayed away. I found out that any media that is available with Dolby Vision has it in the REMUX versions. I was thinking, better quality, and more options, so I started to grab those, thinking they should have backwards compatibility, much like audio. So far, that hasn’t worked. When I try to play them on the TV with Dolby Vision, it goes back to choppy (and I tried running it through that program). When I played it on my current 1080p projector (with the big Atmos surround sound) it plays fine. When I try it on my Samsung TVs, it says colour not supported. I thought it should have 2 video streams, one in HDR10, and the other HDR10+/DV. The Samsung TVs are not overly important. I haven’t had a chance to really play around with it. I was more concerned about trying to play DV properly on the TV that does support it and know it’s going to work before I buy a projector specifically for DV.
