I have been trying to use Plex recently but can’t get any content to stream over LAN. I have tried on multiple clients, some wifi, some wired but every one of them Spikes to 280Mbs when I start a show, and stays between 200-300. The show then buffers and gives me an error about not enough bandwidth.
The plex server is wired to the router, which is an asus ax11000. No vpn or other network devices in play. The files being played are 1080p, averaging around 1.2GB. I tried a different router with the same results. Remote streaming works with no issues. Both during remote streaming and lan directplay is being used.
I think the graph is wrong. Technically, it’s right, because PMS doesn’t know something wrong is going on. PMS is sending the file as-is in packets (pieces) to the client, that’s how file transfers work. But the client is failing to receive these packets in whole, but it doesn’t report to PMS where it failed so PMS thinks it sent the entire thing but in the wrong amount of time so the bandwidth numbers are just wrong. I’m not sure if this can be fixed, but I’ll bring it up with the team.
As for the actual playback problem. I am only looking at the example shown in your logs for your iOS device. It appears that the file is being forced to use direct play, but the file includes eia_608 closed captions. iOS doesn’t support direct playing this so it is failing.
Can you replay this file again and get me the log from the iOS app?
Experiment:
get MKVtoolnixGUI
Drag your misbehaving mp4 file into it and press the “Start multiplexing” button.
Take the resulting MKV file and place it into your library.
Play it.
What happens? Are the results the same or is the network traffic within expected limits?
Attached is the debug log from the iOS device. I tried a few more things, it runs fine on the same device as long as I switch to LTE, but if I switch back to WiFi I get the same result. I event tried a Wifi hotspot which is obviously LTE on the backend and same results. Also I have this problem with 1080p content but not 480p content, though I have only tried a few of each. I will try the suggestion from OttoKerner next. Appreciate you helping.
I couldn’t get MKVtoolnixGUI to work for me. I’m on Windows and I had to download the tool and a separate GUI, so it could be user error or Windows
I did use handbrake to turn it into a 1080p mkv and now it seems to be working better, though it also cut the file size in half so that might just be expected. I still see an initial 250Mbps spike but after that it settles in at 40-50Mbps and the iOS player doesn’t have any problems with the file. So that’s a plus.
I’m going to try a few other types of files and see if I can recreate with all formats.
I think your mp4 file was incorrectly muxed. Whichever software created this file is flawed or has been set up with wrong parameters. Most likely, the “interleaving” of audio, video, and subtitle streams is not done (or done incorrectly).
Remuxing the file to either MKV or to mp4 (with a suitable tool) again can fix that without causing quality loss).
Handbrake does not simply remux the file – it converts (transcodes). A quality loss is therefore to be expected.
Okay I was being dumb with MKVtoolnixGUI, that seems to have helped significantly. Still setting an initial spike and 30-40Mbps spikes which seems high, but everything is running great, no buffering or anything. I still don’t understand why it is only via lan that I see this issue, but I’m not going to ignore what seems to be a solution. I’m off to remux all of my media
Hot Tip:
Drag about 10 over and drop them on MKVTN.
at the top menu under Multiplexer, follow down and find ‘Actions for all tabs’ - Start Multiplexing - there’s a time saver for ya…
Since you’re remuxing anyway, you might want to disable all of these, if you encounter them.
Might as well take the opportunity to assign proper language tags to all audio and subtitle tracks (in case they are still on und)
