Videos are constantly buffering now after 3-5 seconds of playback. Tried diving into logs and couldn’t find much outside of it not liking /24 on trusted network entries. I’ve done everything short of migrating my media off and restarting.
Plex Media Server is running off of Synology DS1520+. Reproduce these issues on Ubuntu/Firefox, Win10/Chrome, Playstation4/app, and Pixel4/app.
I initially thought it was a mistake of configuring SSD cache as read/write instead of read only, but even updating that hasn’t changed performance at all. Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated.
edit: nothing wrong with my network. tried multiple nic combos in the synology and my router. even tried plugging in directly with no luck. something is bottlenecking my playbacks.
Is your local/remote quality in each player set to original? I’m gonna go ahead and guess it’s probably trying to transcode and the Synology can’t keep up.
I’ve tried adjusting it to various settings, even attempted turning on the 'automatically adjust quality (beta)" one.
All these devices played these episodes fine last night and I definitely did not make a specific change to all of them.
The changes I made today were adding another ssd to the cache pool on the nas and to purchase plex pass and enable that intro skip/play preview settings. I’ve reverted back all of the previous with no luck.
You’re burning subtitles. A known weakness with Synology NAS (or any NAS/Linux system using Celeron class CPUs). On Linux based systems, burning subtitles uses the CPU, even when using hardware accelerated transcoding. Also, the process is single threaded. The Celeron CPU’s low powered cores just cannot keep up in real time.
Jul 20, 2021 16:31:28.661 [0x7f63de241b38] DEBUG - [Transcode] MDE: John Wick Chapter 3 Parabellum: selected subtitle cannot be converted to a compatible format, burning into video stream
Jul 20, 2021 16:37:22.250 [0x7f63dcd6cb38] DEBUG - [Transcode] MDE: E8 - Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate: selected subtitle cannot be converted to a compatible format, burning into video stream
Jul 20, 2021 18:02:33.254 [0x7f63d9d5fb38] DEBUG - [Transcode] MDE: E9 - Look Who's Purging Now: selected subtitle cannot be converted to a compatible format, burning into video stream
Also, you’ve a syntax error in Allowed Networks. Correct syntax is 192.168.66.0/24. If you are listing multiple subnets, they are comma separated with no spaces. ex: 192.168.66.0/24,192.168.67.0/24. Note that Plex supports supernetting. 192.168.0.0/16 is valid.
On Windows, use Plex for Windows. It direct plays most media types. Plex Web is limited by the browser, and transcoding is common.
Plex for Android / Android TV will direct play subtitles when video or audio is transcoding. Note that the current Android app has a bug where if the audio is transcoding, the video will transcode as well (at least with EAC3 & TrueHD audio codecs) (reference). This might effect smooth playback on your system.
The log files do not have any records of an Android device playing anything.
Subtitle support varies by client. Unfortunately there is no master list of how each client handles each subtitle type. I’m not sure how the Playstation handles subtitles.
In general, SRT is the most supported format across all clients.
You can dig through the log files to find when subtitles are being burned into the video stream. You can also filter for “burn” on the console (Settings → Troubleshooting → Console).
Also, take a look at Tautulli. It has many useful features, including an info screen similar to Plex Dashboard → Now Playing. However, it also shows when subtitles are direct playing, transcoding, or burning. Plex Dashboard shows when subtitles are enabled, but not if they are begin burned into the video stream.
Tautulli: Same movie, switching between PGS & SRT subtitles.
