Hello,
I have this 1 minute long home video (or several in fact, but I thought I’d start with one). The file is in .mov H.264 format and no more than 130 MB in size.
Why does it buffer constantly on the Windows 10 Plex app? In both web player and iPad app the file plays without issues.
The file is reported to be played Direct.
Is there a setting I should take a look at?
Are you in a separate location from the server? I’m seeing it’s a remote stream, which introduces your ISP upload speed if it really is remote.
It appears to me that this file is not muxed properly for streaming.
Also, there is no good reason to use the antiquated MOV container with H.264 video.
Experiment:
Get MKVtoolnixGUI
drag the mov file into it
“Start Multiplexing”
Take the resulting mkv file and put it onto your Plex server.
(this procedure won’t change the quality of the file)
Thank you Divideby0 for coming back to me!
Yes, this is a remote streaming, but I have a fairly decent upload and download speed both at home where the server is and here I am now.
Please see the following Speedtest.net results:
At the server location:
At my current location:
Yes, I also find it very strange that the transfer rate is 100 Mbps for the duration of the movie. Especially since the movie clip itself, as mentioned, is no more than 130 MB in size…
In this photo I stream from the web application and there you can see that the transfer rate is only for a short time. Also this time in Direct.
Hello OttoKerner,
Thank you for coming back to me.
Now the reason for the MOV container is that this is a home video taken with an iPhone some years ago. This is however still relevant for basically all movies I shoot even today. What I do is that after the movie clip of one of my kids for example is taken, I upload it to my NAS where the Plex server has access to it.
Although I of course can change the container to MKV as you suggest, as you can imagine I have hundreds of these small MOV files… Is there a way to convert them all quickly? If not I have weeks of work ahead of me converting them all one-by-one. 
Sounds good then, forget the 'net speed. Otto’s probably nailed it. If the file is not designed for streaming (old iphone recordings), then players can sometimes be forced to download the entire file over and over, which results in absurdly high data rates.
Some more info in this article: [Solved]Plex Doesn't Play QuickTime .MOV files
It suggests you use an app to re-encode it. I’d like to avoid doing that, especially if you got a lot of files. But MKVTools can make it easy to drag in an entire folder to the app, and it will spit out the files in the same folder in .MKV format. If MKVTools can re-arrange the video data for streaming properly, then that’d be the ideal situation. It’s a great tool I run all my files through when I get 'em.
I see what you mean…
I tried to bulk convert about 90 files from a folder using MKVToolNix and it actually worked, so I guess I’ll have to do that.
Now I have another problem though. I’ve named all my home movies using Plex, not the filename. Hence a file called IMG_1234.mov is called “Kids open birthday present” in Plex.
Converting all files to mkv will reset all names. Is there a way to avoid this? Can i have Plex write the name I’ve given the file to either the file name itself or a metadata that can be read by another software? Mp3tag can for example copy a metadata title to the filename.
Start with the one file.
If that is successful, do another, larger one. Then another one.
By now you have confirmed my suspicion and you can now direct your attention to finding a way to remux those files in “batch mode”.
It might be now possible with mkvtoolnix directly. I seem to remember that the release notes contained something about batch mode.
But even if not, this can be also achieved by using a tiny shell script or batch file.
An example for Windows can be found here: Solution for Audio: Unknown - #6 by OttoKerner
I guess you want rather a tool which can remux your files to the MP4 container format.
Because it is the only one from which Plex can read embedded metadata.
You will still have to find a way to embed a ‘Title’ meta tag into each file.
Um, I don’t know how “Other Videos” works, but if a file with the same name but a different extension is in the same location on Plex, it detects that it is a “duplicate” of an existing item, and stacks them together. If you have both files in place, do a scan, and if Plex marks them as duplicates, you can then move/remove the .mov files and Plex will retain the name change for the new .mkv files.
In the future, it’d be good to embed “Title” metadata into the files themselves. Plex (and all other players) can read this field and display that instead of the filename. This’d make the files future-proof. It will probably take a long time to do so though. Do it once, and it’s done.
(A more technical / automated way to do this would be pretty tricky, but I think technically possible. You’d have to know SQL commands, scripting, and text parsing. But you could probably find the SQL commands to return the “title” field for all your personal media, parse it out, then make a script that takes this info and runs MKVTools to embed the title data into the file. Quite complex, and I wouldn’t recommend going this route unless you have thousands or tens of thousands of personal media)
Unfortunately, “Other Videos” does not work like that because the file is not actually matched to anything. Any change in the file name results in a completely new file being recognized.
Homevideo123.mkv vs. Homevideo123.mov will now show 2 totally different entries in Plex and no duplicates. Even Homevideo.123.mkv vs homevideo.123.mkv would be 2 different files
Your suspicion was correct. I was able to bulk convert mov and mp4 files to mkv using Divideby0’s suggestion using MKVToolNix.
After converting several files they all play nicely. But as mentioned I may have to redo all the names as I did them using Plex naming and not by changing the name of the file. Plex seem to read the filename as the name of the file, so that seem to be the way to go.
Unfortunately it seems like I have to rename the file itself, but as you say, even though it is a long process it should be a one time event.
Plex did unfortunately not pick up the same file name but different file type as a duplicate… I appreciate the suggestion though!
Yes, my test shows the same. Unfortunately.
Something you might consider in this is merging some of those videos. I recently had home movies that were all from the same date. i.e. “Cousins birthday” with 10 different files taken each time I stopped and resumed the recording.
I don’t know if this applies to you, but if it does you can merge some of those into one file. It might cut down on the amount of file renaming you have to do
MKVToolNix does this pretty easily also while you remux them
I do have a few of those yes, so it is a good suggestion to bring along the process. Thank you
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