Ok so I set up my new TV over the weekend, a Sony Android one. Got Plex up and running (seemed to need secure connections enabled on the server in order to work) and all fine.
Incidentally my PMS is running in a virtual machine on a Windows Server box in the garage. It has decent grunt with an i5 quad core CPU and has never had any issues with performance. The network is all gigabit Ethernet, no wifi involved.
Then I decided I’d try some 4K material. I downloaded a Sony demo which had an average bitrate of about 76mbps (yeah very high I know) and it wouldn’t play at all. It was a slideshow of occasional images but apart from that a total failure.
I then tried a movie with an average bitrate of 24mbps. This was far better but still not playing cleanly with odd jerks and pauses all the time.
Umm, what gives? Should I be having such problems? There’s no transcoding going on here so the server should just be serving out the 24mbps stream which is a piffling amount and shouldn’t tax the network or storage system at all.
I’m stumped as to what could be the problem. The TV perhaps? Are there known issues with Android TV 4K playback?
I would have asked if it was wireless but since you say it is wired that is not the case, but is it on same lan? or do you run it though wan?
I came across this issue, where my tv was connecting to plex over wan rather than lan, which limited my speed to my upload speed. further more, what is the passmark score on your cpu? does your TV need transcoding or can it run it in direct play?
Not sure on the exact passmark score but it’s an i5 with a decent amount of grunt. I’ve not explicitly checked whether it was transcoding (will do so tonight) but I don’t believe it was. When I play the same content on my iPad, which obviously does require transcoding, there’s a good delay before it starts playing as the transcoder builds up a buffer and then it plays fine. With the TV, playback starts immediately which leads me to believe it’s direct play.
Well tracking down issues is always a process of elimination so maybe a good first step would be to set up another, temporary PMS on my PC (even more grunt than the server - i7, SSDs etc) and try some 4K content from there to see how it fares compared to the server. Should at least tell me if it’s the server or the TV/network at fault.
Can I have two servers on one account? Will it suddenly cause problems with clients?
You can, I did try some 4k another server of min (Intel i7 990x), works fine, even at 200Mbps stream. Normal 1080p streams are 2k passmark, i would say an 4k is lsoe to 6k in passmark.
True with directplay it should not mater much, check if you are direcrtplay or transcoding. also check read speeds on your harddrive to make it good good here i had to set up a ssd for transcoding.
Ok, works fine via a USB3 stick. Rebooted the server and tried it again and now it’s working. Bizarre. Now sure what the problem was but its using direct play for video and transcoding audio but hardly taxing the server at all really.
