The long story short, one of my ‘Good’ servers hung up on Friday, so, I decided to give Plex on my NAS a shot until I could have someone across the country reset the good one.
Worked BEAUTIFULLY all weekend long. So good that I decided to buy Plex Pass (because I’m sick and tired of e**y)
The moment I upgraded to Plex Pass, playback went to hell.
The only thing I can do to improve it is to Disable video transcoding entirely.
I would rather find out why I can’t watch videos on the NAS after upgrading instead of telling you the specs on my NAS.
When folks upgrade to Plex Pass, they often forget to restart the server and apps. The upgrade requires restart
In Settings - Server - Transcoder, You have to SHOW ADVANCED and, presuming your CPU is HW transcoding capable, enable all the transcoding options.
(the main “use hardware acceleration if available” is off by default )
As stated, I’d rather not disclose the model of my Synology NAS on DSM6, because of the details I mentioned.
If it comes to that point,. I’ll gladly tell you. For now, I’m eliminating the idea that it is the NAS’ fault because it was behaving fine until the Plex Pass.
I did restart it as one of the first steps I would do in troubleshooting.
As I stated, the only thing that improves the playback is if I completely disable transcoding, which I’ve tried and succeeded with. However, not all of my videos will play without some help.
So, what else changes with a Plex Pass so I can disable it to watch the NAS Plex more often.
That was not really the point. I just didn’t want the DS412+ to be blamed here because it was streaming so well without PP.
Is Credit and Intro detection a CPU sucker constantly or just when it’s working?
I’d like to just get it all over with by running the Plex Media Scanner until the job is finished, like I said, I have a different Plex server to pull movies of the NAS.
I found a setting that works and it’s not buffering constantly, disabled the bottom check box (hardware accelerated video encoding).
Now, you may ask, why are you not using the more powerful servers all the time.
1.) Troubleshooting random hangs on the powerful i10 Plex Server.
2.) The other Plex server is across the country with me.
3.) It’s always nice to have redundancy.
Thanks for taking the time to answer this. It was a little off the wall to not give specs first
I won’t badmouth or blame the DS412+ CPU ( Atom D2701 ).
I was asking purely so I can help respond with something meaningful the first time.
When it comes to redundancy, I still have my DS1815+ sitting here running DSM 6.
Credit and Intro detection are a complete CPU hog until everything is processed.
For the D2701, it will be painfully long. So long that I would recommend you backing down the PMS version to something more reasonable for the NAS …
-UNLESS-
You want credit and intro detection.
If you do, then it’s going to struggle until everything enabled by the Plex Pass is ‘processed’ and info populated into the database. There’s very little you can turn off as they are intrinsic to PMS.
I see you’re running 1.31.2 (current)
Without knowing your media, but suspecting you have your media largely in a DirectPlay / DirectStream state (no video transcoding or subtitle burning),
If you want something ‘lighter’ for the CPU, I’d recommend backing down to a pre-1.30.x version of PMS. It comes down to whether or not you want Intro & Credit detection (introduced in the 1.30.x family)
A very good & stable version of PMS is 1.29.2.6364.
I can provide you with any of several versions. We only need pick one.
Given the limits of the CPU (it’s only a dual core), and memory is limited, we need to be cognizant of its limitations.
