I’m running Plex on a Synology DS1520+.
I had one movie streaming via my Apple TV and wanted to see how many streams I could do before I ran into CPU and/or bandwidth limits.
When I tried watching a movie on the second device, it wouldn’t even begin to show the movie.
I didn’t get any error messages, the second stream simply wouldn’t start.
Does Plex support multiple streams from the same server?
Yes.
Sounds like you’re hitting the limits of your server.
The server logs will give you much more info on what is happening.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media/
You should be able to direct play / direct stream multiple streams at one time and also transcode multiple 1080p or lower resolution streams.
The DS1520+ can transcode some 4K video, but it cannot tonemap HDR to SDR (*).
In Settings → Transcoder, make sure you have hardware accelerated transcoding enabled and HDR Tonemapping disabled. See screencap below.
Be aware that all Celeron CPUs struggle with burning subtitles, which occurs on the CPU, so avoid subtitles that force a video transcode (ex: ASS subtitles on most clients).
You can monitor playback via Plex Dashboard → Now Playing. It will show you if the video or audio is direct playing, direct streaming, or transcoding.
(*) The issue with tonemapping is that the necessary Intel drivers are not available in the Synology OS. You can tonemap HDR to SDR if you run Plex Media Server in via docker. See Synology FAQ 28.
Thanks. That’s hard to believe given that nothing else is using the Synology. I’m the only person who uses Plex. I don’t have a feel for system bandwidth issues though. Why the hell does Synology use the crappy Celeron processors?
Thanks.
I’ve never heard for tone mapping before, will have to look at your links.
My settings are now the same, but tone mapping was enabled - previously.
If you get your clients working so that you don’t need transcoding, the server CPU becomes much much less of a bottleneck. NAS units use low end cpus are they are storage devices, not general compute devices.
How does one do that? I thought the HW transcoding is supposed to be fast.
If I may add here.
Then you can get about 4 sessions of good HDR → SDR tone mapping out of the hardware (Intel X86_64 machines only).
“Burning subtitles” Yet more terminology I haven’t heard of, but I’ve seen this in Handrake when I rip the DVDs. I didn’t understand what it is referring to. I don’t need the subtitles, can they be eliminated?
avoid subtitles that force a video transcode
How would one know which subtitles cause that, until it happens during streaming? Even then, it would be a guess.
How does one do this?
I 've used Docker where I work, but have no idea what you’re referring to.
Does this go on the Synology? (I"m still using DMS 6 because of the problems with Plex in DSM 7)
You have to take the media you have and , using a tool such as MKVtoolnix,
Filter out those tracks you don’t want.
The Synology can handle SRT type subtitle type with ease. It’s the image based (PGS, VOBSUB, or DVDRIP) which kill it because it’s adding subtitle into each video frame (stops the hardware from doing what it does best)
Let me get you the How-To’s for both of these.
The master Synology FAQ is here:
The one for creating the Docker overlay on top of shared folder PlexMediaServer is this:
There are multiple tutorials on the net for how to do this for your machine.
In a Nutshell, We find the track(s) we don’t want and UNCHECK the box for that track.
When we click “Multiplex”, MKVtoolnix will read the file; copying only the tracks we want to the output file.
When it’s done, we give that Output File to Plex. All the other junk in there will be gone 
Here, you can see (for example only) I unchecked the SRT subtitles. You will want to uncheck the boxes on ANY tracks you don’t want.
It’ll make it easier to stream plus you will be saving space.
Is it obvious which tracks are SRT?
Can this also be done with Handbrake, that is what I usually use to compress DVDs.
Thanks!!
Look at the picture. It shows them as SubRip/SRT.
If you’re ripping from disc, you will see VOBSUB on DVDs and PGS on Blu-rays. Those are image, not text based, subtitles. They’re “pictures of words” if you will, not text like SRT subtitles.
Do not use Handbrake to remove subtitles from existing files. If you do, it will compress the video again, which will reduce the quality. Handbrake cannot passthrough video like it can with audio.
Use MKVToolNix. It copies the desired tracks to the new MKV file without changing them.
I meant to say “Can I use Handbrake when I’m ripping the DVD”? (as opposed to after it is already compressed) I think there are options for the subtitles, but I never look at those.
I’ve been using Handbrake to make MP4s, I have too many problems with MakeMKV, so I’ve stopped using it as well as MKVToolNix. I only used MKVToolNix to combine multiple MKVs into 1 image.
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