Everything I watch on Plex is slow as sin and buffers every few minutes. But on the same device playing the same file via an SMB network connection on the VLC app the video plays immediately without buffering.
I have original quality turned on, it shouldn’t be transcoding anything, I just don’t get why Plex is so much slower.
Two entirely different engines. VLC is a direct player. PMS is a server and sends it to your player.
Whatever is going into PMS must be such that it can’t be played on your player… A web browser? versus the native VLC app? that’s a huge difference right there. Browsers are 2 channel. Color pallets are limited. Rendering method is multiple layers removed from the actual ‘glass’.
You can’t compare apples and oranges and you really can’t compare anything without finite data about the processor(s), OS, Media info (encoding, etc, etc).
If you’d like to show me what you’re having problems with. (Provide the XML from Get Info -> View XML), give specifics of the processor, OS, and player, and playback environment, We can figure it out.
Wow, thanks for the quick response. This forum is awesome.
So the player is an Apple TV, 4th gen.
The two apps are the TVos VLC app and the TVos Plex app.
The media server is running on a Synology DS215j and the media server is version 1.5.3580
The server doesn’t appear to be peaking system resources during playback.
Direct Play and Original quality are turned on.
Where am I pulling the XML from?
To get the XML for one of the pieces you’re having trouble with.
- Hover over the item
- See the ellipsis exposed. Click it
- Click ‘Get Info’
- Click "View XML’
- A browser page will open. This is the pure XML for the file. It contains everything PMS knows about that file.
The next piece of info I will need are the logs.
- Start playback
- Play until it recreates the problem and then ~10 more seconds
- Stop Playback
- Wait about 10 seconds for it to flush everything to the logs
- Go to Settings - Server - Help - Download Logs
- It will present you with a ZIP file of what just happened.
- Attach it here with your next post and the XML.
Your post helped explain a few things to me, and I just decided that the hardware I had hosting my plex was simply too slow. I’ve migrated my Plex from the Synology to a little Mac Mini I had laying around and it has significantly improved the experience.
Thanks for the kick in the butt.
