Plex on the Raspberry Pi

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Good evening.

I have been playing around with Plex on the Raspberry Pi 3 B+. I have got the server side of it to work, but when playing movies off a usb hard-rive, especially 1080p 8mb movies, it plays them but buffers half way through.

I have also experimented with OSMC on the raspberry Pi and have found that when this plays the 108OP videos it plays them flawlessly even when streaming to an app on my tablet and on my phone. why is OSMC better at this then plex on the raspberry pi.

Also is Emby better than plex on the pi. any suggestions to improve video playback.

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Eliminate any conditions which would cause Plex Media Server to need to transcode media, e.g. graphics based subtitles, and audio and video codecs which your client(s) cannot play directly. PMS doesn’t support hardware transcoding on the Pi (yet?) so it has to be done in software. This is a CPU-intensive operation and the Pi just isn’t up to the challenge.

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What setting do i need to change then please advise. or what do i need to look for

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Plex is playing non HD movies fine and streaming to my tablet, but it struggles to play 108op films not sure why, when my 1080p movie has no DRM

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I’m not sure what you should change; everyone’s situation is different. Configure your server to produce debug logging and reproduce the issue. Attach the generated logs here.

This support article describes how to configure and collect logs:

Make sure to follow step 3, and read through the whole document.

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@pshanew

Makes the best statement you can. You want to set up direct-play for your clients. This means you cannot force that PI’s little CPU to work. That’s okay. This means your video container format needs to be either MP4 or MKV. AVI videos are going to kill you. Plex has to transcode those into an h.264 video container. Also, you want fast flash-based storage locally. This will stop you from hitting local disk bottlenecks.

I doubt this is the case, but make sure your Pi isn’t on WiFi. It’s essentially a server now. Make sure it is hard-wired on your network. Every network blip is a guaranteed chance of lag. Buy a $5 Cat6 or Cat5e cable and save yourself the headache of wondering “is this my problem?”

If you need to convert AVIs to MP4, something like this might be handy:
ffmpeg -i “input_file.avi” -strict experimental -c:a aac -b:a 128k -c:v libx264 -crf 23 “output_file.mp4”

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