I have my Raspberry Pi 3B+ setup with Plex and a USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Limited to USB 2.0 because of the Pi’s ports) setup to stream movies.
I have an LG ThinQ AI TV in my basement connected to my 5Ghz Wi-Fi and I wish to stream the 4K movies I have to it. It works flawlessly from other services like Netflix for 4K streaming (so it’s not the connection from the TV to the router that’s the problem).
I have tested the transfer speed from the hard drive on the PI to my computer (over an SFTP connection) and it comes out to be around 13-14 MiB/s (Mebibyte per second (I think)) which is the equivalent of 115 Mbps (Megabits per second) and Plex claims that in order to stream a 4K movie I have, it takes 25.1 Mbps. So based on this there should be no buffering at all.
But rather what happens is when I play the movie, it loads for about 5 secconds and plays fine for about a minute, perfectly fine. Then after that, the screen goes black for about 15 seconds and then it appears and says buffering, it loads for about 30 seconds and then plays about 2 seconds of the movie.
The external hard drive is 1TB and only about 60GB of it are used. And the Micro SD running Rasbian is 128GB of that only about 10GB are used. I’ve also tried monitoing my space on the Micro SD to see if the buffering was taking up space on it and it didn’t change and yet the movie still froze.
The file I’m trying to play in this instance is an MKV file, I’m not sure if maybe MKV isn’t supported by the TV so the Pi is transcoding the movie, which it appears to be doing because the CPU is at 198% usage by pled alone, but when I scrub to and play a random part of the movie, it loads and plays in about 2 seconds and works perfectly as if MKV is supported, I also thought maybe it’s too low of bandwidth, but based on how it loads random parts of the movie fine I’m not so sure.
Lastly, after the player stops playing the movie for no reason, it doesn’t cooperate any more, like it doesn’t scrub to a new part or anything
I’m at a complete loss, someone please help, thanks!
Moderator: Please format your posts correctly instead of posting one long sentence, thanks.
