Server Version#: 16.3.1402
Player Version#: N/A
The Plex Dashboard (either via web browser or Plex Media Player) reports the bitrate of video being played as approximately double the actual bitrate. This seems to happen regardless of the video being played, or the client doing the playing.
Known issue?
I take it you are not seeing a straight horizontal line but a succession of āpeaksā, right?
Donāt judge by the height of these peaks. Itās the integrated/average bitrate which counts in the end.
Sorry, Iām not a Plex subscriber so I donāt get that extra performance data. Itās what is visible for a standard user when you click āDashboardā and then āShow detailsā which expands the details for an item being played (showing video, audio and subtitle details). A video that is say, 18Mbps (which you can see via āGet Infoā on the item itself) will show in the dashboard as double that.
(the likely reason I noticed this is because Iāve started having buffering issues on my Samsung TV since the 3.109.2 update and was just having a look around).
Ah, I see.
Well, the reason for this is that most video files have a variable bitrate. There can be passages with relatively low bitrate and then when there are explosions or generally much and fast movement on screen, the video bitrate āpeaksā.
The bitrate which is shown under Now Playing is based on these peaks in your files, combined with the abilities of the particular Plex client in use.
Some clients have larger network buffer memory, so they can handle those peaks better than others.
Plex is analysing your files very carefully, to determine their true bandwidth requirements for streaming purposes.
The results of this analysis can be sometimes 3 times as high as the average bitrate of the file.
That makes sense - thank you for the reply. I checked tautulli for a video Iām trying to play at the moment; the quality shows as 56Mbps, but the bandwidth shows as 117.4Mbps and when mousing over this does say āestimateā (vs Plex reporting 115Mbps). Should the value vary depending on when you reload the dashboard? Iāve not noticed it change.
Sadly, Iām beginning to think the buffering issues are (external) network related.
Thank you.
I cannot say anything about how Tautulli is calculating this bitrate number. Maybe it is including the audio bitrate as well.
As a rule of thumb, make sure that the network path from your server is as fast and low-latency as possible.
This rules out the use of wireless networks and/or PowerLan.
At times with high traffic (i.e. the times when everyone in your city/country is sitting back and fires up Netflix) the packet latency between external clients and your Plex server will get worse. And this will also affect the streaming experience.
There is nothing you can do about this, except lowering the bandwidth requirement by transcoding.
Again, thank you. To give context (though this should really be a separate issue), Iāve two servers:
Samsung KS7000 TV is on wireless as this is the only way to get smooth 4K playback (or rather playback over ~50Mbps). The TV sits next to the router and has been working this way without issue for months.
Home internet is 200Mbps down and shows this or higher when tested (ping is currently around 12ms). No-one else uses the network. Remote server is on an extremely fast and reliable network, with around 600Mbps upload. No-one else is using said server, and resource monitoring shows it to be fine. I noticed buffering from the remote server since the latest upgrade, but am in the process of giving everything a complete reboot.
Iāll have to do some more testing. It could be the storage that the remote server uses (google drive which is a bit harder to troubleshoot).
I noticed that this happening to me as well when playing 1080i recorded television on my android box in the living room (streaming from my PC). Plex player on the android was reporting 36 mbps when I know the data file is really 18 mbps (I know the size of the file).
But it turned out that I was right about the bitrate ā but so was the android box. When the android player was negotiating with the windows plex server, the android box must have indicated that it could not handle 1080i, probably because the android box hdmi output was set to 1080p. So it appears that the Plex server decided: well, fine, Iāll send you 1080p then (which I confirmed). It appears that it turned every half frame into a full frame, thereby doubling the required bandwidth. And the android player could not handle the 36 mbps of mpeg2 fast enough. Still, trying to figure how to solve that problem ā but the reported double bitrate was actually the truth.
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