I have a plex server on a raspberry pi 4 with 4 external hdds… I’m using Samsung smart tv (tizen) to watch movies on my same network… I have 2 questions
1- Most of the movies are transcoding when playing, I don’t know why it’s try to transcode and not direct playing.
Is it because of ac3 sound codec is not supported?
2- Again about transcoding. Most of my movies are ok even with transcoding but 4k movies. Raspberry pi cannot handle the 4k transcoding I guess, cpu is getting %100 and movie is not strating. Then it gives me error with unsupported format (sometimes it opens the same file).
Why I can’t direct play the 4k movie? Raspberry is on gigabit ethernet, so network shouldn’t be a problem.
You can dissable video transcoding in PMS
Samsung needs to be set to play the original quality for this to work. Files needs to be complant. Samsung has pretty wide codec/container support so you should be fine
You can disable transcoding in the server settings (check Settings > [Server Name] > Transcoder > Disable video stream transcoding).
If you disable a video and your client cannot direct play it, it will however simply not play or give you an error message.
As for why your Samsung requires Plex to transcode… this could be caused by a lot of different factors:
video format / codec not supported
media characteristics such as bitrate or resolution not supported by the player
subtitle format not supported, requiring the subtitles to be burned into the picture (=transcoding)
client settings for video streaming quality (general settings vs. specific playback quality setting for that particular movie)
movie bitrate peaks exceeding your available network bandwidth (many TVs only support 100 Mbps for wired connections while 4K content can easily exceed that bitrate)
Thanks for the advices. I disabled from the settings and here’s what happened on my tv:
1- Open a 4k video and it seems streaming fine.
2- I tried to change the subtitle, and suddently it gives me an error, “The file associated with this item is not accessible by the server.” Then video never opened again, it always gives me that error.
When I tried to open movies with web browser on my computer, it gives me this error: “This server is not powerful enough to convert video.”
General reasons: see above
For the specific reasons why that particular video is being transcoded you’ll need to check out the now playing section of the Plex dashboard or dig into the server logs
