Hi all!
I have been chasing a recent issue and think I found the cause, and am afraid of what the responses here will be as I may have just wrecked my library…
I have been slowly making improvements to my server, most recently I wanted to transcode all our videos from MKV to MP4 for improved direct play.
I started seeing a lot of buffering with users, and people were mentioning some videos were buffering almost every 20 seconds.
My internet is 1000/1000 Fiber, I did multiple speed tests across many sites to confirm, and my internet was PLENTY for what was being requested, often just 4-10 Mbps direct play videos. The other end was good as well, reporting 200 Mbps download result for the client side.
I confirmed we aren’t on the relay server, ports are open, everything is green. After a lot of digging I found some mention of variable bitrate videos being an issue depending what the bitrate jumps to, which brought me to my recent re-encode to MP4. I used Sickbeard-MP4-Automator, and just used the default settings for the most part.
But I just now saw some buffering for someone playing a video and in the logs see this:
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.570 [9068] DEBUG - Statistics: () Reporting active playback in state 2 of type 4 (scrobble: 0) for account 1088892
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.570 [0956] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Estimated bandwidth for to be 59450kbps over 20.00s
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.570 [0956] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Checking for bandwidth drop on
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.615 [0956] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Estimated bandwidth for to be 59450kbps over 20.00s
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.615 [0956] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Checking for bandwidth drop on
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.825 [4252] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Estimated bandwidth for to be 59450kbps over 20.00s
Jun 30, 2018 19:25:59.826 [4252] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Checking for bandwidth drop on
While that bandwidth request is well within what my internet connection can handle, but I see it go as high as this:
Estimated bandwidth for to be 749378kbps over 10.02s
That’s… pushing it.
What I don’t get is, these files aren’t crazy. They are kids cartoons (in this case) with video files coming in at just a few hundred MB each. Yet I rarely see Plex estimating the bandwidth to be any lower than 20000kbps.
So, did I bork my entire library with this re-encode, or is Plex misjudging the bandwidth requirement? Any hope for me in either scenario?
Thank you very much! I trimmed the logs to remove anything that may be bad to post in public, but can provide any logs needed.
I have had no buffering issues before this, server specs:
Intel i7 7700K
16GB DDR 4
512GB NVME SSD - OS
2x8TB 7200RPM HDDs - Library
256GB SATA SSD - Transcode Drive
1000/1000mbit Fiber Internet
2Gb/s Teamed Network Connection for Server
