Increasing stutters..Does Plex hate my system?

[ITNerd480]

Howdy! I will admit up front that I am new to Plex. I built a htpc/server a few weeks ago, but it seems now that I’m relying on it, some issues are starting to show.

The quick run down is that I wanted to cut the cable bill, so I needed to cancel DirecTV to accomplish that. No problem. Two issues, my main TV is a nice, but “dumb” TV and I obviously need some kind of media management and OTA recording. SiliconDust’s Quatro can handle the OTA connection and a HTPC running Plex could handle the rest, right? Well, that’s where I run into issues.

Playing anything back directly on the box to the dumb TV results in some very small/subtle, random stutters. The image will pause for maybe a 1/4 of a second, but the audio is fine. However, playback on any other device is just fine. Using either my old or new android phones(HTC m10 and 1+ 6T) and a chromecast are fine, along with an Amazon firetv stick on an older TV. no skips, pauses, stutters, etc.
I figured I could deal with the stutter as it was so brief. Logs, and performance data from Plex and the system don’t indicate any issues.

I start watching and recording live TV shows through Plex and find a bigger stutter issue when more than one task is running. Except this time, I find spikes where my HDD is hitting 100%. Having a live TV stream up in the player and the task manager up over that show me that those pauses. This would also randomly cause a recording to fail, even those the spikes are very brief. The spikes repeated 7%-100%-7%-100%-7%-100% continuously. Task manager and resource monitor show this is due to the transcoder eating the HDD alive. OK, no problem. I have an older 500GB drive I can throw in there, to basically be a disk for the transcoder. I also moved the PMP over to that drive, just to take some utilization aware from the 4TB drive with the recordings.

However, this did not stop my stutter issue. It’s rare for the main drive to hit 100%, but now the visual stutter can last a second or two. I figured a second drive would help, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. CPU, RAM and Network utilization are all low. I’m really surprised the CPU doesn’t get above 10-15% utilization, too.

Currently this is the build I put together: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/nZ7FnH
The extra drive I tossed in is a 7200RPM 500GB HGST drive
I’m also running Win10 Pro – Most current version.
I’ve disabled the sporadic library updates and even scaled back the logging to ensure that’s not causing any issues. I’ve tested playback from multiple devices simultaneously to confirm only the HTPC has the issues… well… most of the time. It seems that recording two shows, and watching two recordings on two other devices did hit the hdd pretty hard. Which, I suppose I can understand. One other thing I noticed is that recording through the HDHR app to the same drive does not use anywhere near the same disk utilization that Plex is using. --Yes, I paid for that since I’m using the HDHR Premium for the few cable channels I actually watch and Plex can’t do multiple EPG sources. Hardware acceleration/decoding on or off also doesn’t seem to make a difference.

At this point, I’m considering rebuilding the server. Installing Windows, PMS, and PMP on the 500GB drive… maybe even just grabbing a 120GB SSD for it. Then blasting the Windows partition on the 4TB drive and letting that just hold the data. My fear is that I’m going to waste a Saturday setting this all back up, just to run in to the same stuttering issues.

Anyone have any thoughts?

EDIT: the 500GB drive was running in my gaming PC until 6months ago when I grabbed a 2TB drive for it, so the performance on it is fine.

[ITNerd480]

Just realized how long my post is…

TL;DR… Had some playback stutter issues directly on the system…The system is both a HTPC and PMS and had a single 4TB 5400rpm HDD. Added addition 500GB 7200RPM drive and pointed transcoder to it, moved PMP to it, but issue only got worse.

I’m really thinking I’m just going to reload the system… install windows to the 500GB drive, along with PMS and PMP. Then that 4TB drive can just be the storage drive for libraries.

[pl_5309]

Started with an 8GB, i3 and 5400rpm laptop drive for 4 streams, really doesn’t need that much resources.

Majority of TV is MPEG2, unless you have a client with that codec it transcodes to h.264 (ie browser). This is part of the delay but the larger delay comes from Plex’s server centric design vs Silicone Dust’s client centric. When you tune the channel Plex starts grabbing the stream from the HDHR and writing to disk then starts up a stream for the client reading from disk and transcoding if necessary. This causes a 5-10 second delay and stutters in the first 30 seconds. This enables multiple people to watch the same channel, Timeshift and only use one tuner as well as transcode down to 2-8 Mbs for remote devices.

SD clients have the MPEG2 codec and stream directly from the HDHR to one local client, not exactly apple to apples feature wise.

Install the MPEG2 codec from Microsoft for your PMP, it is no longer installed by default.

[ITNerd480]

Thanks for the replay. I had the MPEG2 codec installed, as the HDHomeRun app prompts for it on launch if it’s not installed.

I set something to record mid-day and when I checked to see what the quality was, it was absolutely atrocious. The problem was definitely getting worse. After work, I just blasted the system and reloaded Windows and everything else. I don’t have much recorded, so I just rebuilt the Plex libraries, that way if there was something with the Plex install, it didn’t carry over. It was a pain to go through and setup all the recordings again, but it was worth it.
Absolutely no lag or stutter on the system anymore. Recorded two shows while playing a 3rd and drive activity never peaked over 65%. and the 65% was the 500GB drive, probably due to transcodes on the shows that were recording.

I did go with my plan… Windows is on the 500GB drive, along with PMS and PMP. The second drive is just the Libraries. I’m unsure if the issue was an OS issue or maybe PMS issue, but the nuclear option seems to have worked.