These were tested with Refresh Rate Switching ‘ON’. I suspected this is the primary culprit of this issue.
I already have that movie in my collection, so I just attempted with my copy. It does NOT have the issue as the others are also saying (you’ll see three playback attempts in the logs). I believe this is because my Shield is already set to 59.94Hz so the refresh rate doesn’t have to change.
I then attempted a 480p 23.976fps h264 bt.601 video. This exhibited the freezing behavior. This should be the last playback attempt in the logs.
Edit: So further testing with Refresh Rate Switching Off/On have inconsistent results. The load time seems to vary from test to test. Sometimes it plays normally, sometimes the video freeze is a second, sometimes it’s 10, and sometimes I get an infinite buffer… (these tests were done with 480p and 1080p h264 video at 23.976fps/25fps/29.97fps/59.94fps,)
I think I may have found the problem I had WD red old drives before that I had for years and I threw them to I’ve been buying ultra stars now so I threw that another movie that kept freezing on me it’s never worked fine onto one of my ultra stars and it worked fine and then I thought to myself maybe that drive out it’s a very old one that I have maybe it’s working too hard when I put it on high quality so then I lowered my home stream down on that drive for to play test it on that drive on 720p and it works fine I was like what the hell so that drive is worn out so much it can’t handle it when I set it to max anymore like it used to but my other drive that’s still good no problems sitting in the max so looks like I have to get some new drives
i think that’s just coincidence in your case, it’s certainly not a drive issue causing the issue.
i have 720p files that played fine previously that now has the video freezing for the first few seconds but audio continues to play.
yet i have full bluray remux files that play perfect, proving that the drives have no issues playing high bitrate content.
as i suggested earlier, this issue was introduced in a previous client update, and it was reported by quite a few during beta testing of that client release (with logs included), yet plex ignored those reports and released it anyway.
it’s a trend that happens all the time with plex beta clients, where issues are reported and seemingly ignored, which is why many have given up beta testing as it seems to be a pointless exercise.
Interesting maybe your drives even worse than mine have you have a new drive you can just test it on or USB stick and add it to the Plex really quick just to see if maybe the drive is just going the way of all the other maybe yours is even worse than mine so 720p is even too hard for it maybe if I keep playing on mine then 720p will eventually be too hard remember those SMR drives if you have one aren’t good and they get worn out faster and their data rates slow down so it definitely could be my other drives have been buying now or all data center grade drives not WD pros not iron wolf pros not iron wolf it’s not WD reds either Western digital golds or WD ultra stars or Seagate exynos drives only the best and the price isn’t too bad either try it out I mean it’s worth trying I’m you want to get it fixed I mean try everything sometimes technology is stupid and the things that you don’t understand is like that’s dumb but it still works trust me try everything That’s what I did I was getting frustrated
Hey but don’t get me wrong maybe it is because that update maybe this new update made it harder for the drive and put more demand on the drive which is causing it to need a newer drive or not as work as good as it before so it could be both it could be part of the drive and that new update
it has nothing to do with the drive.
i’m running 5 x 4TB nas grade drives in RAID 5.
why would a 500MB 720p file with a fairly low bitrate struggle to play on a drive that had issues when playing a 70GB 4k HDR10 file with extremely high bitrate files play perfectly.
I don’t think this is a good example because it starts out dark for a while. I can’t tell if it’s freezing or not.
Another guess is that it’s missing the initial keyframe in the video and starting at the next one. I’m not sure what keyframe encoder settings BDs and UHDs are required to have off the top of my head, but my optimized versions (using ffmpeg from a remux, not Plex) have a min keyframe of 23 and a max of 250. 250 is around 10 seconds, which might explain why some are taking that long to sync.
