I friend of mine (also a plex pass user), showed me today he was having a problem playing back some, not all, mkv files from his web-browser. He had not changed anything in Plex, but now it was giving errors that looked like he did not have enough space available to transcode. The drive being used to transcode had over 100GB of space available so there is no way this could be the case.
After a lot of playing with settings we found that if changed the following setting, things worked fine:
: Settings : Web : Player
UNCHECK - Direct Stream - Allows the server to copy compatible audio and video streams without converting them.
He had not changed this setting, it just quit working.
When I got home, I found I had the same issue, with some, not all, videos and changing the same setting solves it. Making the same change seems to have also solved it, but here is my trouble and the reason for my post here:
- I dont want to transcode unless I have to transcode. These files always played fine in Chrome why the sudden change
- Checking that box (as it originally was) should allow it to direct stream. direct streaming means it is NOT transcoding so why is it giving a transcode error. When we un-check the box it works but it is in fact transcoding both audio and video.
- I know there was a recent Plex upgrade. I"m a DVR user and just upgraded mine to the latest version in the past week. I can’t speak for my friend who is not a DVR user, but there is a regular update out there so he liked made it as well. Could this be an issue in the new update?
I took screenshots of the error but for some reason it wont let me attach. I’ll add them if i can.
