HI i have installed plex server on this Laptop
Specs are
i3 7100u , 8 Gb ram , 120 GB ssd
While my Media is in External 2 TB HDD,
when every i watching anything Video Lags alot and by alot i mean alot ,
it buffers every few seconds , Even if i m watching 20 30 mint video files
i play directly on that laptop Web Broswer ( Chrome ) its just becoming night mare
I dont have that many programs installed on this laptop as its work laptop so nothing much is installed and nothing takes more than 1cpu usage while Plex is trasncoding like crazy
Tried to set cpu affinity to 2 cores , change buffer time 30 secs and 5 secs nothing is working any suggestion Guys
A quick look at your log shows PMS trying to transcode HEVC videos. This takes a lot of CPU power. Web browsers don’t currently support HEVC video, which is why the transcode is occurring. Your cpu has a parrmark of 3795, which is not very high. This is not going to be able to handle transcoding hevc video very well.
This answer was EXTREMELY helpful for me, because in my scenario I moved my server to a DS218play NAS, and some movies when I’d play them on my PC (8 cores) would cause my NAS CPU to pin at 95% and the movie would take forever to load and then buffer every 20 secs.
Meanwhile, the same movie streamed perfectly fine to my Shield and Rokus. I had finally narrowed it down to “something about the movie itself” and figured it was codec related somehow, but didnt know for sure.
This answers it PERFECTLY and now I know to avoid, for now and when possible, H-265 content.
Alternatively, if you are playing back on a PC, try out Plex Media Player. That also has a desktop mode , which is basically the same as Plex Web, but this runs in our own browser engine and this can playback h265 so no need for transcoding, unless you lower the bitrate for some reason. That will always cause a transcode.
Thanks, I had been trying to use both web and Plex Media Player but was seeing the same issue. However you mentioned lowering the bitrate would cause transcoding to occur. I was definitely doing that with the hopes that it would reduce CPU load, now I understand it was probably making it worse.
So I would just need to leave quality and bitrate settings at ORIGINAL, right?
I should ask, what do you mean by “desktop mode”? Just that it can run full screen vs windowed? I didn’t see a setting that speaks to it.
PMP can play most codecs (almost all), so it will not need the video transcoded, so there won’t be any load on your CPU. If you lower the quality, that has to be done server side, so it will use your CPU. You can lower the load by lowering the quality, but it would be better to leave it at original.
