Okay, I’ll try to be as descriptive as possible about my problem:
I have Plex Media Server installed on a Dell Poweredge 2900 with Windows 2012 R2. It has dual Xeon Quad-Core CPU’s and 24GB of RAM and runs the video files off of a raid 5 array. I have the transcoder on PMS to “Make My CPU Hurt” and it doesn’t ever break more than 25% usage during streaming. I have a 60Mb/s internet connection, gigabit wired LAN, and 802.11AC WiFi.
There are specific video files I am having an issue with. They are with a particular television series and they just started with playback that skips ahead, jerks, and distorts the image of the video. It skips so much it’ll go through a half hour episode in just a couple minutes. However, it didn’t start right away. It started towards the end of the first season of the show and is continuing so far as I can tell into the second season. The video format is .mkv and is consistent through the entire show. So far as I can tell all of my other shows run with zero problems. This ONLY occurs on my PS4 though. My PS3, my laptop, my tablet, and my phone all stream the show with zero difficulties. It even plays just fine when I run it directly through the PMS on the server.
I’ve tried tweaking settings and I’m at my wit’s end, nothing helps. I can watch it on my laptop, etc…but I wanna be able to watch this show on the regular TV.
I would need to get my hand on one of those video files to see if we can reproduce it. Are you able to upload it somewhere so I can try it out? PM me the link please.
Direct Stream is a trick that allows us to shift the format of a video w/o transcoding it. The video stream is taken from your MKV and remuxed into an HLS stream. The format ~shifts from MKV to an MPEGTS HLS stream. When Direct Stream is disabled the video stream in your MKV is fully transcoded by Plex Media Server.
I think the video stream in the MKV is a higher AVC level than the PS4 wants to play. Disabling Direct Stream causes the video to transcode and Plex Media Server is configured to force the AVC level to 4.0. There’s a few other reasons why transcoding is better for devices. You’re lucky enough to have a kick ass server to do some fierce transcoding.
Will you please attach the XML Media Information for one of the weird videos? Likewise you can just tell me the Level reported in the videos Media Information. Here’s one of my videos that goes crazy too:
Other Smart TV clients automatically shift to transcoding when the level is too high. I’ve held this change back from the PS3/4 while we first sorted through a device bug and then through some UI refinements.
Sorry you hit this! Super frustrating “just playing a video” gets complicated.
