Hi,
When playing anything with up to 50 Mbit/s i have never seen any buffering, when pushing 80+ Mbit/s the video randomly buffers every 1-10min so it seems that there is some bottleneck.
Wired connection, movie is on old laptop with internal SSD (Read/Wrie 500/500).
Direct play (no transcode) on a Sony X950H
What is the best way to test where my bottleneck is and tips on how to fix?.
Ok i think i found the bottleneck which was something i would never have guessed.
So my tv and all tv’s are capped at 100Mbit/s ethernet cards :O.
So i guess when i push 80+ Mbit/s im so close to the max speed it might buffer every now and then?.
So either buy a USB 3.0 to Gigabit adapter or just plug in usb 3.0 HDD right into tv for the biggest bitrate.
I can also try to optimize Wifi on tv , but not sure if i can ever get it stable enough.
nVidia Shield Pro. It has an actual Gigabit Ethernet port.
I heard from one user who also had success with the optional wired ethernet adapter for the FireTV. (Not sure he used files with such a high bitrate though.)
Plex performs an in-depth bitrate analysis (if you let it). The thing is: the bitrate value you are seeing in the regular media info is just an averaged value which is stupidly calculated by doing file size/play length. However, the bitrate of compressed video can fluctuate wildly. So the actually required bitrate at some times can be much higher than the average value.
You can see the results of the in-depth analysis when you look at the Plex XML info of a movie. It’s in the requiredBandwidths="... properties. They exist for the whole file as one (used in Direct Play) and for every single stream separately (important when Direct Streaming).
Thank you, will also check the info for the files to see if they are above 100.
@morten_storesund_hydro_com something else to look at as well is your actual Network/Router. I had an Asus Router and I would Direct stream 4K to my TV. I had a few files that would come very close to the 100 mbps cap of the physical connection and would get constant buffering. I had to upgrade my router and finally decided to go with Unifi ( Dream Machine ) and I was shocked at the fact that I was now able to stream some of my 4K files that I was never able to. Watching the utilization graph, There were some spikes above 100 mbps with no buffering and if I had a buffer, it was for a second and not as annoying as before.
I say all of this just to underscore the fact that your actual network hardware WILL have an impact.
The Amazon adapter is 10/100, not gigabit.
If users have a strong 5 GHz 802.11ac signal where the TV/FireTV is located, they will probably have better streaming results using WiFi than wired Ethernet.
Most recent FireTV devices have 802.11ac 2 X 2 WiFi (Device Specifications).
Using the Analiti app on my FireStick 4K, I see ~225 Mbps download speeds from an iPerf3 server on my DS918+.
My LG TV has 802.11ac 1x1. There is no speed test app for an LG, but the WiFi provides an effective throughput greater than 100 Mbps. I’ve a couple of 80+ Mbps 4K movies that buffer when the LG is connected via wired Ethernet. The same movies do not buffer when the TV is connected via WiFi.
Good to know. I have removed the switch that was used between plex server pc and tv.
Pc is now connected directly to Router with ethernet and router is standing right by the tv and now trying to see if WIFI is good enough.
Watched allot of 4k/HDR Netflix yesterday and a local 30Mbit/s movie with 0 buffering, will be fun to see if it can handle the ones with highest bitrate.
If this fails i will try ethernet on tv on this router, next is to test a newer switch that i have access to.
Last will be to use directly connected HDD to USB 3.0 on tv if all the above fails.
I am testing Wifi on tv atm, router placed right by tv and seems good so far. But not tested biggest strreams.
Switches typically aren’t the issue. The router does the heavy lifting. Wifi will work, only if it’s the only one utilizing the network and has a great signal. if you have other devices streaming stuff wirelessly at the same time, you might have issues. The way to maximize a wifi connection is if the TV is capable of connecting to the 5Ghz channel and then just having the TV connect to that network by itself so it has the road to itself.
This is how I am connected atm, only device on 5ghz is tv and its as close to the router as it can get.
There are also only 1 stream at the time.
0 dropouts/buffering so far, but only watched 15Mbit/s netflix + 10-30 Mbit/s plex streams.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
