Plex has just been terrible for awhile now on the whole transcoding issue and transcoding perfectly good h264/aac files to h264/aac on clients that can play them already, b/c if you force direct play, they work just fine.
It’s beyond frustrating and the logic that Plex uses to even figure this out is completely broken and has been for some time.
So with the added hardware transcoding support for synology intel processors things have vastly improved. While I still don’t agree with having to transcode at all this method does work.
Same situation, same frustration here. I purchased the HDHR Extend because my media server computer is a minimum spec core 2 duo laptop that doesn’t handle more than one transcoding session. My setup is as follows:
HDHomeRun EXTEND v.20170930
PMS v.1.10.0.4516 (I just updated this tonight and confirm having the same issue on v.1.9.x)
Roku Ultra 4660x v8.0.1
What I’m seeing in the “Plex Media Server.log” file is that transcoding of H264 to H264 is occurring to reduce the bitrate down to an 8000kbps limit. See the relevant log file lines below:
Dec 04, 2017 22:27:32.618 [0x80aaa6400] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Changing decision parameters to fit bandwidth limit of 8000kbps
Dec 04, 2017 22:27:32.619 [0x80aaa6400] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Reducing playback quality for 7619kbps stream bitrate: video resolution to 1920x1080, audio channels to 2, quality to 8
I’m assuming that the Roku client is advertising this limit, but I have set all the client side Video setting to > 8Mbps and no matter what I set on that side, the 8000kbps limit never changes within the log file.
If anyone on this forum knows of where in the hell this 8000kbps limit is getting derived from, we may have a fix.
I can’t explain it, and I haven’t looked to see if anything autoupdated or something, but tonight when I launched live TV, my video is running in Direct Stream mode. Life is good, but I wish I knew what changed.
