Aside from that, Plexbmc is pretty slick. Just a bummer that the vast majority of my movies won't play smooth.
PlexBMC ? Isn't that an entirely different project from RasPlex ? (I'm pretty sure it is.)
I've used both myself, and while early versions of RasPlex were less responsive than normal XBMC plus the PlexBMC addon, this has changed a lot lately. I'm now using RasPlex 0.1.35, and this version is far more responsive, both as compared to its earlier versions and to comparable installations of normal XBMC with PlexBMC (including RaspBMC and OpenELEC).
As for the smooth playing of movies, current RasPlex works fine for most of mine. But naturally a relatively weak CPU like we have in the RPi will always have problems with the most demanding HD encodings. Some people forget that the pixel resolution is not the main limiting factor here. That would instead be the overall bitrate and compression methods.
One 1080p movie may play perfectly, while another using the same Codec may stutter horribly, simply because it uses a much higher bitrate, or more complex encoding (demands more CPU work for playback). Both of those problems may be helped or even cured by better use of Plex transcoding (assuming you have a PMS server with sufficient CPU power).
Sorry, I misspoke. Yes, Rasplex, not Plexbmc. It definitely seems that my issue is related to 1080p encodes with DTS as the only audio track--as the CPU is forced to downmix the audio, which it just can't handle. Increasing the overclock definitely helped (eliminating or greatly reducing the stutter), but I found out that leaving the Pi running overnight with the overclock ended up corrupting my SD card. I would be fine with forcing transcoding, but as I mentioned before, resuming a previously watched movie with forced transcoding ends up resulting in a gray screen. Hitting stop then also alters the point of resume to somewhere near the beginning of the video (however many seconds I waited watching the gray screen before stopping).
Since I'll never be using Rasplex with an audio receiver to handle the DTS decoding, until the Pi Foundation/XBMC folks work out their proposed solution with DTS being decoded by the GPU (thread over on the Openelec forum), which is being held up by DTS, or the resuming video with forced transcode issue, I don't think I can reliably use the Pi with my media library.
I would be fine with forcing transcoding, but as I mentioned before, resuming a previously watched movie with forced transcoding ends up resulting in a gray screen. Hitting stop then also alters the point of resume to somewhere near the beginning of the video (however many seconds I waited watching the gray screen before stopping).
Since I'll never be using Rasplex with an audio receiver to handle the DTS decoding, until the Pi Foundation/XBMC folks work out their proposed solution with DTS being decoded by the GPU (thread over on the Openelec forum), which is being held up by DTS, or the resuming video with forced transcode issue, I don't think I can reliably use the Pi with my media library.
This isn't really a problem unique to the RPi, but is due the PMS server not being able to handle transcoded video properly, when it comes to repositioning the playback position to anything other than the start of the entire video file. It affects not only resumption of a video played earlier but also any 'stepping', fast-forwarding or rewinding in transcoded videos.
I've seen this complaint repeated many times over in these forums, often as a complaint against a specific Plex client, which may be why the problem hasn't been fixed, since it isn't caused by the clients.
This is a bug/limitation of the PMS server, so a fix for that server is the only way to solve this problem.
