" * Updated the player engine. We’d love lots of feedback around the playback experience. How is 1080p and 4K playback working compared to PMP? "
The only problem I’ve had so far is that one movie (Godzilla vs Kong) in 4K is now really choppy on my HTPC, also running the Plex Media Server. I have already watched this movie on the old PMP and it worked no problems, but after uninstalling and installing Plex HTPC it is a stuttering mess, other 4K movies like the Snyder Cut of Justice League is working no problems. Task Manager reports under 50% usage on my 7th Gen i3 processor which I’ve been using the whole time, and playing Godzilla vs Kong directly through the file itself with MPC-HC works flawlessly, it’s only an issue in Plex…
I think I have an update. I am watching a movie now. Ive noticed that the IR remote is not responding anymore, and the plex iPhone app can not see the player in cast devices anymore. Now the movie freezes 23 min before finishing.
While writhing this it started to play again. Movie progress bar remains in screen, and I have a play instead of pause even though the movie is already playing. Movie progress time does not progress even though the movie is playing. Keyboard plex controles temporarily did not respond anymore. I can only alt tab out of the screen and terminate the process manually. ive added the latest logPlex HTPC.log (2.3 MB)
24p content plays fine in PMP but vertical and horizontal panneling are choppy in Plex HTPC with refresh rate switching turned on.
Tested content covers all kinds of formats : 720p, 1080p, in x264/x265 both 8bit and 10bit, with both versions 1.1.0 and 1.2.0
4 days since the 1.2 announcement, and I am still on 1.1. Is there a command line to force an update check, since the gui does not appear to have one?
I am especially interested in the back button fix.
EDIT: My inpatients got the best of me and I eventually discovered the links in the "Introducing Plex HTPC post pointed to the 1.2 release, so I DL’d from there and upgraded from 1.1 to 1.2 manually… Seems OK, but the back button still acts like the exit button. More digging…
EDIT2: Turns out the button on the remote is called “Replay”, but that is not a function I could find in Flirc or Windows media player. I have several Roku’s, and had gotten used to the replay button winding back 10 seconds in the Roku version of Plex. I later realized that the “Rewind” function served the purpose I was looking for, so I cranked up the My Harmony app and made the adjustment. Works as expected now - Exit is back and Replay is rewind. Peace restored…
Have been using the latest build for a few days now.
Seems to be getting better!! Can now see the volume animation over the top of plex HTPC.
The video navigation bar now looks more reasonable and disappears in good time.
Would still love to see subtitle offset settings available in the video navigation as well as the hot keys.
A few questions/requests though:
Is it possible to prevent particular media art from displaying on the screen saver?
Is “watch together” coming soon?
is there a way to refresh or customise the “Genre” or “actor” variable in recommendations?
I know we can customise the actual lines that are displayed but would be nice to refresh or choose the variable (probably a server setting though?)
I tried with and without Refresh Rate Switching, no difference, although I did find turning Hardware Decoding off improved the stuttering, it was still an absolute mess, but it felt like I was seeing 12 frames a second instead of 4. I’ll mention again that it seems that out of the five movies I tested, some in 4K and some in 1080p, all worked fine except for Godzilla vs Kong, which worked fine on PMP. I also can play the same movie just fine if I play it on my gaming PC which I upgraded to Plex HTPC at the same time. At first I thought that perhaps Plex HTPC is more demanding when trying to run 4K vs PMP, and that my HTPC could no longer keep up, honestly I have no idea though, but am concerned about the fluidity of popping movies on my HTPC moving forward and being able to watch them seamlessly…
Had/have the same thing. I just solved it quick&dirty by going to General settings in the OS and set it to hide the top menu bar with dropdown activation.
Glad to hear that it’s not just me.
Well, that’s a rather harsh comment on the last and best Plasma display ever produced and a reference even today for display quality. Do yourself a favour and Google Pioneer Kuro PDP-LX5090, young Padawan for you education. I am sure that I’m not the only one with an older but very good display here. I also don’t have the latest Mac mini, but I do have the last one which can play DVD’s.
Don’t take it personally. Just commenting on what happens in the real world with your product.
I think that if you focus more on making Plex work better on old hardware, you would make more of your customers happy. My stored library of movies does not contain any HDR or 4K content.
All of that I that I get from my streaming services. KISS
Had another issue with Mortal Kombat now, stutter like Godzilla v Kong, both are 4K HDR, I am thinking it may be an issue with 4K HDR movies, as this movie was smaller than others like Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and yet it stutters. Justice League is 4K but not HDR.
So odd… again playing the file directly with MPC-HC works no problems, only through Plex it stutters… and it plays fine through Plex HTPC on my gaming machine. These movies worked fine on the old PMP…
I have also noticed similar stuttering issues when playing different 4K HDR movies. I have noticed, that stuttering occurs for me on very high bitrate movies (>= 65 Mbit/s), but it does not occur on lower bitrate 4K HDR content (<= 55 Mbit/s).
My player is is a very slow AMD Athlon 200GE with Vega3 graphics. And i can see while playing high bitrate 4K HDR files the CPU and GPU are under a high load. NOTE: The TV connected to this client is only 1080p and not HDR capable. But the player should also be capable of Direct Playing with Downsampling and Tone Mapping at the client.
With the old “Plex Media Player” in TV-Mode i don’t have any issues playing back high bitrate files, there it plays just fine.
With Plex HTPC i have enabled Hardware Accelleration, but i have also tested without. But without HW-acc. playback is just unusable, then also 1080p movies stutter. With HW-acc. enabled, all is fine except high bitrate 4K HDR Files.
It’s very much deserved. I stand by my comment that overscanning is despicable behavior. I’m sorry that I insulted your precious little display but forcing overscan is completely inexcusable. This disqualifies it from the “good display” category. There are plasma displays that don’t force overscan (I’ve seen several of them over the years) so your claim of this being the best ever produced is suspect at best. “Just commenting on what happens in the real world.”
By video navigation do you mean the settings for that video when you are playing it? If so, they are there. During playback if you move to the dots on the right of the video playback controls, there are the settings for this individual playback and there you will find the offset settings for audio and subtitles.
I believe it takes a random selection from your pinned sources.
The recommendations are provided by the server and the client doesn’t really control what it gets here.
What I mean is there a way to force it to cycle to a different “genre” or “actor”. For example, say it shows “top movies in comedy” is there a way to refresh to then show a different “top movies in X”
Will have a look at the subtitle offsets in the 3 dots
Hi Mr-Reed, thanks for the help. That was my default setting for Plex, but since there is a bug in the new Mac client which keeps the top bar visible, I went for the movie mode in order to hide it.
I can probably fix the overscan, but I don’t want to screw up the calibration just to deal with a bug in Plex.
I forgot to mention that this is one of my clients, which is not HDR capable (nor 4K), so even if i wanted, i could not enable HDR in the windows settings.
I can remember, that i have used a build of Kodi with DSPlayer and MadVR as renderer in combination with plex for kodi previously on my Athlon 200GE client for playing back my 3D-MVC movies. That has worked flawlessly without any stuttering.
I have also tested the playback with high bitrate 4K HDR files, which were downsampled at the client to 1080p by the MadVR renderer. I haven’t noticed any stuttering.
But nevertheless i will try Kodi19 with plex for kodi.
It might be a bug in your Mac OS installation or user profile, I have a mac client running Mojave and I don’t have this behavior.
Try creating a new user, launch Plex from that new user and see if the problem persists.
Care to link please?
I long since sold my Harmony when Plex announced the death of the HTPC concept. Looks like a need a (far cheaper) replacement to monitor progress of Plex for HTPC.
