Server Version#: 1.20.2.3402
Player Version#: 1.20.2.3402-0fec14d92
I have read multiple forums posts regrading sluggish UI. My issue extends to the movie files played as well. I have a thin client (Lenovo 710q Mini) that I use for my HTPC. It’s generally low powered and makes use of the integrated GPU. I choose a Windows based machine specifically because it should be capable of playing anything and everything more or less natively (as apposed to any bespoke device, like Apple TV or otherwise).
Firstly, I must throw my hat in with the crowd talking about the slow UI performance. Plex Player shouldn’t require a monster machine to run the UI. There isn’t anything crazy enough to merit its performance issues. The UI is slow to come up, slow to respond to hovering over buttons, and feels bad to use. It looks good, sure, but i would take 50% less “looks good” and 100% more “works better”.
I was attempting to watch a 1080p copy of a movie I own and was annoyed with frequent stuttering/frame pausing. The audio was in sync with the issues (i.e. the brief pauses would cause the audio to stop also). The stutters were nearly unanimously very short, 100ms or so, but noticeable. Some of them were much longer, long enough for me to spit out the phrases like “Jesus Christ” and “This is awful” before it went back to playing.
While playing, I checked Task Manager and noticed some 17% GPU dedicated to DWM, and some 50-70% being used by Plex Player. I tried to restart the thin client to no avail; the issue persisted. I checked the Server in real time to confirm it wasn’t some form of transcoding issue. The Server was not transcoding the file (although as I type this, it occurs to me I don’t know what it was actually doing, like direct stream or direct play). Even if it was, the issue would be seen buffering rather than stuttering like it was.
I tried the same video through VLC with 0 issues. No stuttering, 20% GPU usuage. I tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration with no effect.
To be clear, the UI has always felt slow to operate with the delays in animation. I would prefer it to look less pretty and be more functional/responsive. That aside, having this stuttering issue makes Plex Media Player functionally worthless. I might as well simply play the file directly from the server with VLC.
I would have spent more time resolving and looking into it were it not for the fact that we were doing movie night with the rest of the extended family, so pausing everything to diagnose this issue and resolve would have really wasted a bunch of folks time.
