Hey Plex people! I need some help with a recommendation or article or something.
I have my Plex server running off of an iMac with a 3.2GhZ processor, 128GB of RAM and plenty of disk space. It’s connected to an external drive that houses my movies.
I have everything hardwired including my Tv & XBOX Series X which I use most often to watch Plex with.
My video is encoded at 1080P so it’s not like I’m trying to play 4K video.
My issue is that I cannot play anything using Original quality locally without the video immediately buffering every few seconds, to the point that everything is unwatchable.
I am only able to successfully play a movie if I set the server to transcode all media to 720P/4.0MB.
All I want to do is be able to watch my 1080P rips with their assigned audio (mostly 7.1 DTS:X or ATMOS.
Yes, I have an atmos-enabled sound at and anything else I play with 7.1 audio works fine. (Netflix/etc)
Why can’t I play my files locally at the original quality setting in Plex with the original intended audio? This is driving me nuts.
That sounds weird but fixable especially considering it’s just 1080p.
We will need to hear your network details, ip addresses, subnets, remote access yes/no, VLANs, VPNs, and info about your playback chain, AVR, soundbar, cable types, ports used, and whether your media has subtitles.
If you’re using DHCP on your LAN, it’s a good idea to set it to give out optimal DNS servers, two excellent choices being.
primary 1.1.1.1
secondary 9.9.9.9
My initial guess assuming your hardware is modern and hooked up correctly:
When plex for whatever reason is unable to establish a direct connection from server to player on a LAN, it falls back to a WAN system designed to keep playback working even if some hardware has a problem. When it does that fall back, maybe because you’ve told plex to only use secure connections but they are failing due to some Certificate or DNS issue, those fall backs use a remote WAN computer called a Relay. Because your traffic in those cases is being sent through a remote relay, the WAN traffic is restricted to 720p 2mbps or w/e your limit.
That’s just a guess. You can enable PMS Debug Logging, restart PMS, and grab logs right after demonstrating the problem for 30sec. You can zip and upload your server log here after redacting your email and anything personal your can think to search for like public IP address etc.
When you’re redacting your Plex Media Server.log, also search for WAN
If see that appear in connection with this test, it’s switching to remote relay.
In that case you can also search for error or critical which might say why.
especially considering it’s just 1080p.