Server Version#: 1.16.3.1433
Player Version#: Rasplex 1.8.0 & Current FireTV version
I have been having problems with some (but not all) ripped and compressed BluRay movies pausing/freezing/studdering on playback. Playback will freeze at random times for random amounts of time, but generally not more than a few seconds, then when it starts playing, I get audio, and the video plays fast to catch up to the audio and then once it catches up, they get into sync and play ok for a random amount of time. My rips are compressed using Handbrake using H265 and I use the ‘Auto Passthrough’ for the audio. My RasPlex clients are RasPi3’s, and my plex server is a VMWare VM running on a host powered by a Xeon E5-2680v3 CPU and has 6 vCPUs and 24GB RAM assigned to it. The storage that the Plex VM is running on consists of two FreeNAS zVols on a 10 disk ‘RAID10’, with the VMWare host connected to the FreeNAS server via two 10GbE links. Media is a NFS share off a Windows VM that is mounted on the Plex VM at boot time.
The VM Has 24GB RAM because I WAS trans-coding to RAMDISK, but I had issues with running out of space (or so it seemed) when recording OTA TV using the DVR functionality.
I don’t have issues with DVD rips, and like I said, it’s not ALL BluRay rips, but all BlueRays have been compressed using H625 for some time now.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what would be causing this or what to be looking for?
Your first step should be updating your Plex Media Server. This version is 12+ months old.
As for thoughts:
I don’t think the FireTV will deal with h.265 encoded videos, so it’s worth having a look at the server dashboard to see the playback details for that video and what else might cause the transcoding.
With optimized videos, network performance should not be a significant bottleneck… still – can you verify the bandwidth between your server and the players?
If the server and players are on different subnets you might have run into a situation where your server will stream the media “remotely” to your clients – if your remote access is not properly configured you might run into an indirect playback situation which has limited bandwidth (1 Mbps, 2 Mbps for Plex Pass members)
Ok, so I updated to 1.20. Not sure I like the new UI layout, but at least they don’t seem to have added a ton of worthless junk to it (and removing useful features) like they’re been doing with the Android/FireTV clients. We’ll see where that goes.
The thing about the FireTVs is This issue seems to be random, and for this particular movie, it was actually on one of my RasPlex’s, not a FireTV, and I’ve never had a FireTV not be able to play, unless that’s because it was being transcoded to another format by Plex, and last night (before I upgraded Plex) I watched a different BluRay ripped movie that was Handbrake encoded with the exact same settings and it played without issue.
Everything is on the same subnet, the physical servers are linked with 10GbE, with dual 1GbE links into my main switch with everything linking up at whatever the devices ability is up to 1Gb. Nothing is wireless, all hard wired.
So it seems this ‘update’ to 1.20 completely broke the ability to do anything from the app on my phone… Phone app updated two days ago, worked fine except for the apparent newfound ability to NOT be able to use a ‘directional pad’ to navigate the connected server… Now? NOTHING. No movies, recorded shows, other TV shows… REALLY not happy… what is it with this ‘cloud push’ that adds worthless nonsense and breaks everything that worked perfectly before?
What’s wrong with having a Plex Server, then you have the Plex Clients that stream from that LOCAL server and THAT’S IT?
Edit: I was able to regain the lost functionality by UPGRADING to a previous version of the app on my phone… NOT COOL guys…
