Hi all. I’ve been fighting this issue for quite a while now and have run out of ideas. I know the issue is I bought a TV that really should just go in the skip but seeing as I can’t replace it I’m trying to find a method that might work.
The TV is a Panasonic 50DX750B running the Plex App on FirefoxOS. For whatever reason, it will not direct play 4K 60fps HEVC recorded on an iPhone X. The server was running on a NAS which I know does not have the power to transcode so I ran the server on my i5 8400 & GTX 1060 6GB but still it could not handle the transcode and the playback was very stuttery and PC hardware was running flat out. I’ve tried both wired and wireless so don’t believe its a network limitation.
The only way I’ve ever been able to get playback to work is by using DLNA streams and using handbrake to manually transcode but this takes time and I would really like to just be able to put the media into a Plex library and then browse it when I require.
Really hoping theres some Plex wizard out there who can think of something I haven’t. I’m struggling to believe a GTX 1060 doesn’t have the power to transcode a single stream.
Appreciate any time helping me and hopefully will save me having to build a Windows PC purely to direct play.
It does. But in order to take advantage of hardware-accelerated transcoding, a Plex Pass is required. Without one, you’re limited to software transcoding, and that processor does not have the performance to transcode 4K HEVC.
Thanks for the quick reply. I did have a Plex Pass - I used a free trial to test it out and it was still stuttering. I’ll be upgrading my PC to an i9 9900 down the line but I’d still not bet this being able to transcode for the TV.
Ah, gotcha. I’d have expected either the CPU’s integrated GPU with Quick Sync or the Nvidia GPU to be able to handle the decoding and encoding in that case. It sounds as though hardware acceleration wasn’t be used for some reason. If you still had your Plex Pass troubleshooting could be performed.
I’ll have a look at getting a month’s plex pass to do some troubleshooting. Is there anything specific you would require to see other than CPU/GPU percentages etc? Thanks for the help.
Screenshots of the Plex Dashboard while playing back problematic content and PMS logs with Debug enabled and Verbose disabled (the default settings) would be where you’d want to start.
It was stuttery (very!) over WiFi so I hooked up ethernet (I think the TV runs at 100mbps). Over ethernet it was improved but still stuttery - I used task manager and confirmed the GPU was working at 20% and the CPU around 60%.
Now the media is running from a QNAP TS251+ NAS share over gigabit ethernet to my gaming PC which is also on gigabit ethernet - however I wanted to see if any latency from the network was causing it. I copied a 52mbps original quality 4K 60fps HEVC to my PCs SSD and tried again and this time flawless playback. Seems that there was just a bit of latency between the NAS, the PC and the TV so I now have some thinking to do (this may finally be my excuse to dump the QNAP!).
Interesting. At least you know where to focus your efforts now. It seems strange that a transcoded, 52 Mbps file would expose a network throughput/latency bottleneck, but that appears to be the case.
Yeah it does seem strange. Maybe it’s the drives in the NAS but they are WD Reds so I wouldn’t have thought so.
My two options now are to build a new server or potentially try a cheap Windows client over HDMI into the TV for directplay over gigabit instead of relying on transcoding.
