Kodi on my phone runs files off of SMB share just fine. No tearing, no buffering, and has responsive seeking. Yet plex doesn’t play the file at all, and this is over wifi. h265 1080p .mkv.
server: Win10, A10-5800K, 16GB ram. Local and remote set at original for testing.
router: ac-88u
phone: s7 exynos 8890 wifi streaming
Plex doesn’t know yet that your phone supports h.265 video. So the server tries to transcode the video in real time to h.264, which fails due to the massive computation load for this task.
Thanks for the reply otto. Follow-up Q, essentially plex doesn’t honor the original video settings? I thought plex supported h.265 since 2014? and the android app since 2015?
It has nothing to do with ‘honoring’.
By default, Plex doesn’t assume, that a device can play h.265. So if it encounters a file in h.265 it tries to make that file playable. This is done by transcoding it to h.264, which is supported anywhere.
It may have also to do with the ‘age’ of your particular model. If it is relatively new, Plex may simply doesn’t know that it is able to play h.265 natively.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Plex uses the default video playback angine of the platform (i.e. Android/Samsung in your case), whereas Kodi brings its own engine.
The two different engines may differ in abilities/compatibility.
Please post the mediainfo XML of your video file so maybe the developers of the Android client can check its compatibility with the platform.
