Buffering on PC, not on phone or TV

Plex Players Desktop Players
1

Hi there. I have an interesting problem. I am trying to watch a TV show on Plex on my PC (i9-9900k, RTX3090 etc.) Coming from a Synology NAS DS218Play. When I try to do so with Plex via the web (e.g. Chrome) it is constantly buffering and basically unwatchable.

When I try to watch it through both my android phone or on my tv(using a Chromecast) it works flawlessly. I would investigate the file formats and all those relevant details but if it is working fine on one device surely it should work fine on my computer. Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

2

Keep in mind that streaming through a browser has quite a number of limitations and is most likely to require the video to be transcoded. If your server isn’t up to the job, that’ll make all the difference.

You can easily check is a stream is being transcoded on the „now playing“ tile of the server dashboard.

Exemplary screenshot from the "now playing" section

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Thanks for the reply. It is indeed being transcoded.
1080p (HEVC1080p Main 10)
-1080p (H264)

Is there a remedy for this? I have read the term Direct Play somewhere. Would this be possible? If it matters I have a decent mesh network set up.

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Most browsers don’t support direct playing HEVC encoded media (or only with very specific parameters).

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The ARM CPU in the 218Play will struggle to transcode anything over 720p video. It has no hardware acceleration available, so a Plex Pass will not help.

Try using Plex Desktop for Windows. It direct plays many more video/audio formats than Plex Web.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and under Downloads, choose Apps & Devices.

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