H.265 Movies buffer even when playing on same machine

General Discussions
1

Hi All, I feel like I must be doing something wrong. Even when I play movies on the same machine (Windows 10 PC) as my Plex server, it will still buffer whereas when I play files straight from VLC, everything is instant. I first realized this when I started messing with the quality settings. I realized that my quality was for some reason defaulting to 2 Mbps for some movies and when I turn it up to the highest option (20Mbps 1080p), it would buffer for 5-6 seconds before playing the movie and sometimes stop to buffer in the middle of the movie as well.

From troubleshooting, I believe the difference is the files with buffering use H.265 (displayed as HEVC Main 10 in Plex). Are those handled differently for reason and is there something I can do differently to make them not buffer?

image

Defaults to this:
image

Longer buffering time when I change to this:
image

For these files, I don’t see the option to play at “Original Quality” either:
image

On files with H.264 which are playing at “Original Quality”, the “buffering” is minimal… like 1 second.
image

I’m using the Web Player via this URL via Firefox:

Web Player Version 4.34.4
Plex Media Server Version 1.20.1.3252
Firefox 81.0.1

image

image

2

Web browsers don’t support HEVC, which means the server has to transcode in realtime from HEVC to AVC.
This requires a lot of computing power. Your server computer may not have sufficient power to do that fast enough.

Don’t use the web app for playback of HEVC material.
Use either the Plex Player for Windows or Plex Media Player https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/#plex-app

3

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.