My Plex server is running on an i5 laptop with 8GB ram (Windows 10 64bit).
And my Plex client is Nvidia Shield TV.
This is my setup for the last 5-6 months and I had a HD (1080p) TV and was playing 1080p videos with Atmos or DTS sound with no transcoding.
I had no issues with this setup.
Yesterday I got a 4K TV and started using 2160p videos with Atmos (7.1 TruHD) audio.
Obviously these files are 5-6 times larger and have a very high bitrate.
My laptop and Shield TV are connected with ethernet cable to a Gigabit switch (connected with 1000Mbit/s)
So there is really nothing between them that would cause any bandwidth issue.
However, when I watch these high bitrate videos, movie cuts down at some point and randomly there is stuttered video and audio.
when the video is cut, Plex client complains about connectivity issues between server and client, or says that the bandwidth between them is not enough to play this video.
Suspecting the ethernet cable and switch, I replaced them (new cables and a different gigabit switch)
But that did not solve the problem.
As a last solution, I installed Plex server on the Shield TV and made Shield TV connect to the network share on my laptop. So the file is still on the laptop and there’s still cables and switch between the source file and Plex client.
But with this setup, movie plays successully.
In both setups there is no transcoding. x265 movie with 7.1 channel audio is played directly on the Shield TV.
So what could be the issue that occurs when I use the Plex server on Windows 10 laptop ?
When you play from the server on the laptop, check the task manager and look at the resources being used, then do the same when playing from the shield… I’d say there’s a choke point that exists in one scenario that doesn’t exist in the other… Like maybe when playing from the Laptop there’s high CPU usage for some reason, and that doesn’t exist when the laptop is just acting as a NAS… something along those lines… But I dunno, that’s a strange issue
thanks for your response. Actually I’ve already checked cpu, memory and some other system resources (disk IO etc.) but couldn’t see any issues.
and the Plex client/server is complaining about bandwidth. (Could it be misleading ?)
really a strange one…
bandwidth is data throughput… not just “network traffic”. it takes bandwidth to get data from a hard drive to the motherboard, through the motherboard to the ram, from the ram to the cpu, from the cpu to the network interface, etc… All of that is bandwidth… not just from the pc to the client… I’d suspect it’s something like that honestly…
