Buffering on 1080p video

Plex Players Streaming Devices
,
1

Server Version#: 1.22.1.4275
Player Version#: 5.12.0

I am facing serious buffering issues while trying to play 1080p HEVC content on my Samsung Smart TV using Plex and I’m not able to figure out why. Here are the key details:

  1. My TV supports HEVC files so there should be no need to transcode at all. I tried to play the files using a USB drive and they played perfectly well. But Plex seems to be transcoding the video to H.264. These are MKV files but I am not playing them with subtitles.

  2. I have a 150 mbps connection and on WiFi I generally get speeds of ~100 mbps. I checked the server logs and under the ‘speed =>’ string I found the values were almost always over 2 and often over 3. From whatever I’ve read, this should result in playback with no buffering.

  3. Not sure if this is relevant, but I have a dual band router. My TV is on the 5 GHz band but my laptop is on 2.4 GHz. But I’ve also tried to stream using a laptop that’s on 5 GHz and that also has repeated buffering.

  4. The issue only seems to be with resolution and not bitrate. If the original is even 3.1 mbps 1080p and I switch to 3 mbps 720p, the buffering goes away. But even 2.5 mbps 1080p causes buffering.

  5. My laptop has Ubuntu 20.04 with a snap install of Plex. For some reason, there have not been any updates to the server in a long time (by this I mean I have not been prompted to update, I don’t know if they’re happening in the background). Not sure if this is relevant.

If there are any other details required, please mention.

2

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.