I have a movie file, 75gig, video 4k DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10, 70Mbs), audio TRUEHD 7.1 3Mbs (according to plex dash ios app)
I am getting buffering every 20 seconds when the movie is played, the cpu usage of the PMS is 5-8%, Ram is at 11% (32gig in total) ethernet is sending between 60 to 70Mbs according to task manager. No one else is logged into the server, just me, no remote users/sharing
PMS is running on Hp z420, Intel Xeon E5-1620 V2, 32gig ram, Nvidia Quadro P4000, and is version 1.41.2.10156
The tv is a Sony Bravia running plex version 10.30.6.4151
If i convert it to 1080p HD (High) (on the TV) no buffering everything works.
If the pms is sat there doing very little why am I getting buffering? i dont think its a hardware resource issue as everything seems good, any logs I can check? how can I tell whats causing the buffering.
Thanks for any help.
PMS is hard wired as is the TV with Cat6 all going to a gigabit switch.
That’s an UHD Bluray remux.
The bandwidth numbers are just average. There can be peaks in them, which go above 100mbps
TrueHD can be far above 3mbps. Particularly with Atmos. I don’t think Plex is reporting the right bandwidth on atmos streams.
The video decoders in TV devices are developed and tested with typical “streaming video” bandwidths and codecs. These were never intended for the demanding data stream from an UHD BR.
The entertainment industry doesn’t consider BR rips as the typical content for Smart TVs.
Your TV doesn’t have a Gbit Ethernet port. 100mbps is all it can do wired.
Use GitHub - fifonik/FFBitrateViewer: Visualizes video bitrate received by ffprobe.exe to take a look at the actual bitrates of your file. You might be surprised.
If this file is already longer than 24 hours on your server, you could also take a look at the plex media info XML of this movie. Unless you have disabled it in settings, Plex server will calculate the actual bitrate requirements for each stream in the file. Look at the requiredBandwidths=XML property of the video stream.
If it’s an Android TV with a high speed USB port, there may be a USB to gigabit ethernet adapter that “just works.” This is what I use on my Hisense Android TV.
Interesting info, I had no idea the file was a UHD Bluray, I couldn’t find the requiredbandwidths entry in the file properties or the xml file, what setting would control that?
Used ffbitrateviewer (as suggested) and that said avg bitrate 63031kb and max bit rate 145Mbs.
Also, as a test, viewed the file on my sons pc, cat6 hardwired, no issues, no buffering no nothing, his nic (according to task manager) was consistanty receiving 130Mbs.
looks like just a big file for the tv.
Might try out the usb to gigabit etherner adapter see how that works.
There you have it. That’s above the capabilities of your TV’s Ethernet port.
It is generated during the server maintenance period. The setting is called “Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance”. And it takes a lot of time to generate because Plex has to read through the whole file in order to compute it correctly.
