I haven’t been using Plex for very long, and now I have a problem that I have been looking for a solution to for days, and I just can’t find it. The Plex server runs from my laptop under Windows 11.
My problem is that movies with a higher bitrate (like 15 mb/s) start to skip when my laptop is in idle. So I start playing a movie on my TV and at first it runs perfectly, without lagging and buffering. In my laptop’s power management settings, I have 5 minutes to turn off the screen and “never” value to go to sleep. The 5 minutes pass, the movie still runs perfectly, and then about 3 minutes after the laptop screen is turned off, the movie starts lagging, stops every second and buffers, so it becomes unwatchable. However, the moment I press a key on my laptop, or move the mouse, and the display turns on, it comes out of idle, and the movie immediately continues perfectly without any lagging or buffering.
So based on this, it looks like my computer is taking back either processor power or network power after the display turns off. In task manager, I tried to see if there is any particular drop in processor usage or network activity from the moment it starts to buffer, but I didn’t see anything, only that when the display is turned back on, the processor usage jumps to 100% and network activity also increases. (Although it could be that the fallback occurs the moment the display is turned off, only the next 3 minutes the problem doesn’t occur yet because so much has already been pre-buffered, but the task manager doesn’t show the activity that far back.)
The things I have tried:
- In the power management settings, set the minimum processor usage to 100%
- Change the PCI Express “Power management of connection state” from maximum power saving to “off”.
- I looked in the BIOS but could not find a setting that could be related to this.
- I set the screen off time to never, then the problem didn’t occur, so it’s a workaround, but I don’t want to use it in the long run.
