How Stream 4K Content in Home with both wired and wireless TVs

General Discussions
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Hello, I hate to ask a question that I know has been asked multiple times but I am unable to find and answer similar to the problem I am facing. I have purchased multiple digital 4K movies and am currently using Plex to distribute them throughout my home on a home made server using Unraid. The content streams without difficulty to my 4K living room TV and 4K Projector in my home theater (Wired with Cat 7 both with Nvidia Shields) but my children are unable to watch the content without buffering on their 1080P TVs using Firesticks. There will be short episodes of buffering followed by a message that the server is too slow to transcode the material. My server hardware is fairly dated;
Supermicro H8DM8-2 Motherboard with Quadcore AMD Opteron 2384 @ 2700 MHz. 24 GiB DDR 2 RAM.

My Network = Linksys Velop Mesh WiFi.

I am not really sure what I need to door update for my kids to able to watch the movies on their TVs with Plex? They can watch 1080P content without diff but the 4K buffers every 5-10 seconds. Thank you for any help /advice.

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The server has to change the resolution from 4K to 1080p, which means your transcoding. Ive read the 4K thread for Plex and its suggested that if you have a mix of 4K and 1080p clients that you have both 4K and 1080p files. So my suggestion is to make a copy of these movies that are 1080p.

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Thank you for your reply. I should have mentioned that my 4K TV in workout room is doing the same thing while trying to stream 4K material over WiFi from the Plex server (Just without the error message and says “Buffering”). I know 4K is hard to stream wirelessly but the same TV has no trouble streaming 4K Netflix shows. How should I name the files so that they show up differently and allow you to select which version you want? Haven’t ever used two versions of the same movie before. Thanks for your help.

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Ah Thanks TeknoJunky. That clears things up a bit. How do you create a separate Plex library for 4K content? Thanks!

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You don’t have to create a separate library, but IMO it makes things simpler.

First you must put your 4k content on a separate path from your non-4k.

something like

/media/movies-4k
/media/tv-4k

then you would add a new library, of the applicable type, with the appropriate path(s), in the same manner as any new library.

  • Plex Web
  • click MORE
  • click the + next to your server name
7

Id do a 4K Library and a 1080 Library. But thats just me. Its going to be a long while before I upgrade to 4K, if I ever do.

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Thank you for your help everyone!! Greatly appreciate it!!

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