Plex Buffering On LAN

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: latest
Player Version#:

Hello

In the last 3 or 4 days, Plex has been buffering on the LAN. It was working fine before then. Here is the setup:

Plex physical server: Win 10, Nvidia 1070 GPU, I5-6500CPU, 16GB RAM, 1GB ethernet wired

videos are stored on a Qnap, hardwired, 1GB ethernet

buffering happens on all devices: laptop, desktop, firestick. it does not matter if its hardwired or WiFi

i have: updated/restarted plex, restarted router, restarted switches, ran a repair on plex, ran a repair on windows (sfc /scannow), restarted Qnap

all resources (ram, cpu, gpu) on plex server are fine and running below 30%

this seems to happen on all movies and higher quality shows (1080p, .MKV, no subs)

i can also directly play the video from the Qnap (not using Plex) on any device and it works without issue.

if i lower the quality down to 480p or the lowest 720p option in Plex, the video does play, but of course looks terrible.

i can transfer video file from the plex server to the qnap and maintain a 100MB/s transfer speed.

so i do not believe the network or Qnap is the issue, but either the plex server or plex itself.

any suggestions on what or where i should be looking to trouble shoot this?

thanks!

edit: Plex physical server (OS and Plex) are running on a Samsung SSD drive

2

What information is showing in the “now playing” tile for that playback on the Plex server dashboard? I’m particularly interested if the video is considered streaming local, remote or indirect.
Exemplary screenshot from the "now playing" section

3

it does say Local/Direct Stream
image

4

i should also add my internet bandwidth is 500 down and 100 up.

5

From what I remember, decoding/re-encoding EAC3 can be quite heavy for the CPU; maybe not on the same level as video transcoding but way beyond what you usually see from audio transcoding. IIRC this encoder is running as a single thread.

How is your Windows machine aggregating the performance of that 4-core CPU? Does it show as a max. capacity of 400% (each core w/ 100%) or does it show the capacity of all 4 cores as 100% (where each core will make up for 25%). I’m not sure if that could explain the approx. 30% total load while causing the stream to buffer.

Do you see the same behavior if you use a file without EAC3 (e.g. using an optimized version using “classic” AC3)?

7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.