Hello Nicolaidenmark,
I’ve experienced as you. I have a Sony Bravia 55x8096 with Plex on a QNAP TS-228A. The NAS has only 4 cores (I think 1.4 GHz), so not a powerful NAS. If I use Emby Media Server (!), the caching/buffering (monitored on my ASUS router) loads 32MBytes/s in a few seconds, and the 4k movies are running perfect, without lagging. But, if I use Plex Media Server on the same NAS with the same TV, the troughput in the buffering phase are only ~4MB/s mostly, but sometimes ~70Mbits/s (~9MBytes/s). I’ve checked the stats, and it seems, the Emby are using the HW capabilities on the TV, but the Plex doesn’t.
From server side, the load is only 1-4% in the processor. The NAS has gigabit, the TV is on WiFi (ac, 5GHz, ~400Mbit/s).
The bottleneck is, as I see, is not in the “not too much performance in the NAS”, not in the TV, not in the network, but on the Plex client software installed on the TV.
Who can help us? I’m Plex Pass user, and I want to be in future… Emby is not bad, but the UI is a little bit buggy, although the 4k playing capabilities of Emby are perfect!
One more input: if I stream from the QNAP TS-228A a 4k movie to my Note 10+, it’s absolutely perfect, no lagging. The buffering is ~30MByte/s, on the same WiFi network.
I am having the same issue direct playing a Star Wars 4k fan edit from my W10 server to th e 2017 Nvidia shield TV. It always freezes in the same spot and displays the bandwidth warning. Everything is connected via gigabit ethernet so that shouldn’t be the problem. Not really sure what to do.Log and XML.zip (446.9 KB)
i’m having the same issue, 4k77 version of star wars constantly buffering
running plex on a desktop AMD fx 8320 eight core with 8gb ddr3 ram
sw4k77.zip (17.4 KB)
Please take all Windows issues into their appropriate area.
Synology NAS devices with hardware transcoding do not have this problem.
There is no Linux support for AMD CPUs at this time.
If it won’t direct Play as HEVC, there will be problems on FX-series machines or anything else not HEVC capable in hardware.
As shown in the above-attached XML: HEVC.
<Media id="9923" duration="7310336" bitrate="86021" width="3840" height="2160"
aspectRatio="1.78" audioChannels="6" audioCodec="dca-ma" videoCodec="hevc"
videoResolution="4k" container="mkv" videoFrameRate="24p" audioProfile="ma"
videoProfile="main 10">
Why is it that:
With a 55 mbit average 4K HDR Rise of Skywalker film played on my TV (Plex Client, Android Sony,) my TV Plex App says: ”Direct Play” for both audio and video but when entering the Plex Dashboard on the Web, I get that it needs 109 mbits? The Dashboard states ”Direct Play” for both audio and video as well. This causes the video to stall as my TV only has a 100 mbit LAN port.
Essentially same problem as I had with the fan edits. This indicates that I won’t be able to purchase, rip and play future 4K videos…
The ‘peaks’ go well above ‘average’.
If you encode so that you create material with an ‘average’ bit rate that doesn’t ‘peak’ at 109mbits - you’re creating material that fits your stuff. If you need to play material at 200mbits - get better stuff.
I have some movies with average bit rates in the 40-50 Mbps range.
Peak ranges are well over 135 Mbps.
Do the basic math at the raw bits in flight here assuming a complete scene change:
- 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,440 pixels
- Each pixel is encoded with 10 bits of color for R, G, and B. ( 30 bits )
8,294,440 * 30 = 248,832,000 bits in flight for just the video.
H.264/H.265 compression (block quantization) does reduce this some but the bigger the blocks, the blockier the image.
Now add 1.5+ Mbps for the audio.
Lastly add TCP/IP overhead to transport the audio & video packets to the TV.
(stream Mb/s * 1.2 = Approx bits per second to send over the wire/wifi )
Thing is: I tried the Fan edit Star Wars on VLC and it plays fine. If it can do it, why can’t Plex?
Completely different architecture and not comparable. See Plex as a web server while VLC plays everything locally.
So, why would being a web server make Plex inferior witth regards to handling of bandwidth?
I figured out what my problem was. The issue ended up being the New Video Player. I went into the Plex app settings and disable the New Video Player and the 4k content played just fine. I hope this helps others experiencing similar issues. For reference my client is a 2017 Nvidia Shield TV.
Interesting! I just tried going back to the old player on my Sony Android TV. Whilst it had no effect on my 4K Fan Edit (stalls in exactly the same spot), with the old player, I have no problems playing Rise of Skywalker 4K HDR (MKV rip of Retail BD, so no extra compression done in order to reduce the size or bit rate) as long as I steer clear of the True HD Audio. That’s due to incompatibility with my TV, however, and shouldn’t be blamed on Plex.
@JDlacobbo
What 4K content did you try to play?
This should only be a temporary work around, since the new player will become the only player soon. So you guys should rather sort out your problems with the new player instead of just switching to the old one.
Well, as we do not know why the Old player handles the bitrates / dataflow better than the new one, it’s not easy for us to fix 
IMO, Plex staff should focus on curing the new player of its bad habit of requiring much more bandwidth than the old one instead
There we go - fixed that for ya.
My point exactly. Thanks! 
The problem is Plex won’t fix the issues with the new player before they remove the old one.
Does anyone here think that won’t happen?
Disclaimer:
I’m a Plex App on FireTV Victim.
I’ve grown so accustomed to disappointment/grief/rage when dealing with my Plex App on FireTV I expect Plex to make it unusable for years at a time and yet seem so unconcerned about the state of it.
Plex tries not to think about FireTV.
It’s just better for Plex that way.
That’s not true. They try to fix stuff, at least they tried their best whenever I reported issues.
@DaveBinM also keeps repeating that one should report issues rather than just switch to the old player, so I take that from a Plex employee as how to approach this.
If you report issues in detail (ie with logs) and ping the right people, chances are high that something is going to happen. Maybe not the next day, but somebody will stop by to help.
They apparently know what the issue is, have the fix in place - that doesn’t work on FireTV.
I know full well how this goes. I have 3 FireTV’s in the Plexiverse right now I can’t boot automatically when they pause for more than a minute because I need that setting on 0 so it won’t pause their streams randomly for them - while they’re watching something.
In the interim - while we wait for this ‘Big Fix’ to trickle down to FireTV… I have made another round of Text Message pleas for Stop - instead of - Pause.
We’ll see how that goes.
