Server Version#: 1.27.0.5897
Player Version#: 1.53.1.3225
it looks like only the player for mac is having this playback issue for me.
i have the same movies as H264 as well as HEVC versions. plex for mac plays the H264 versions fine. however the HEVC versions tend to stutter and pause a lot. i cannot get more than a few seconds of playback before a freeze.
tried the trick of pausing the movie for a while, but when resuming playback it just gives me 3-4 seconds of good playback.
tried streaming the exact same movies over plex for iOS and they both work fine. also tried playing the HEVC files from finder on the mac and they play fine as well. have also tried playing the HEVC movie directly from plex media server opened in a browser - no issues either.
looks like the mac player has some problem it seems.
What is your hardware? Some mac hardware cannot hardware decode HEVC and some can. Also try disabling hardware decoding in the settings and see if that makes a difference.
this is also happening on the windows plex app (player).
disabling hardware decoding is not fixing the problem.
must be some other issue. all these new HEVC encodes i added play fine when loading the media server in a browser.
on windows they play (Edge), on mac they play (Firefox)
noticed today that there is another media server update available. just updated it to 1.28.0.5999 about a week ago. will take a look at changelog for the new version.
i don’t like jumping on latest updates right away because i put time and effort into setting up my library and don’t need an update that potentially undoes all my work.
anyone know what is causing this issue or experiencing the same ?
i’ve already experimented with playing HEVC content directly from within Finder (Mac) and File Explorer (Windows), no issues with playback there. also plays smoothly directly in the media server (browser-based).
very choppy and nearly unplayable with the Plex for Windows and Plex for Mac Player apps.
would like to note that not ALL of my HEVC content experiences this problem on the Player app. just some of them (those parameters for the video or audio in my previous post are from the content that gives me an issue).
since HEVC gives me about 50% space savings for the same content, i plan to commit to the format for everything new I store in my collections.
I have the same issue from my mac studio, definitely not cacused by hardware capabililty. desktop version is the updated 1.54.2 and the macOS version is upgraded to 12.6. the problem is only for a few videos and seems no other commonalities except the HEVC coding. and my pms version is still 1.27.1, is that the root cause?
Not necessarily. There are HEVC encodings which may exceed the hardware decoding capabilities of the M1/2 chips and on top of that Apple is not very forthcoming about what these exact limits are. The app’s logs may yield some info on this.
If you are direct playing, this is highly unlikely to be the cause.
I also tested the same video with Infuse in the same machine and there’s no problem, so I excluded the hardware issue. and I pretty sure I used the previous version to play the same video smoothly months before.
BTW, to tell what kind video will cause such problem, I tested other videos and found some hevc coding videos cause the app crashed, attached is the error report. maybe not the same issue, but please look into it. err.log (164.2 KB)
