Last night a friend and I were testing his server with my Roku client with a remote connection.
We saw something we do not understand, hopefully someone can shed some light on it (or fix it, if it is a bug).
Setup: The movie video is at 1080P, audio is 5.1.
We got direct play to work with the Roku settings show here,
as shown here. All is well at this point.
However when I change only the Direct Play setting on the Roku client to Auto instead of Force, the Plex server seemingly starts trans-coding everything. as you can see here.
The audio I understand, but why the video and the container? Like I said, the video played fine un-trans-coded.
Oh, I noticed that the server was reporting it was sending 7.9 Mbps under “Auto”, and 13.4 Mbps under “Forced”. Is that what is causing the trans-coding? If I change the Roku video remote setting to 12 Mbps 1080, would it not trans-code the video?
Your remote quality is set to 8 Mbps. When you set Direct Play to yes, my guess is that this overrides the remote quality settings and tells the server to just send the file as it is.
Change the remote quality to original and you should be fine.
I have to agree with @shark2k. The setting in the “Remote” section is a bottleneck. Looks like your file is encoded at 10.1mbps, trying to wedge through an 8mbps window. Either increasing the size of the window, or forcing Direct Play (as you did) would solve the issue.
As said above, the bandwidth in PlexPy is really all you need to see. The “Remote Quality” in the app is set at 8mb, the first play you show is 13.4 (10.1 is the avg bit rate) while the second is sitting at 7.9mb/s.
Set the remote quality to above the file bit rate and you won’t have to force direct play. If your limit is below the file bit rate, Plex will transcode to make it fit the bandwidth restrictions.
@AmazingRando24 said:
I have to agree with @shark2k. The setting in the “Remote” section is a bottleneck. Looks like your file is encoded at 10.1mbps, trying to wedge through an 8mbps window. Either increasing the size of the window, or forcing Direct Play (as you did) would solve the issue.
Forcing direct play fixes that problem, but I could hear no audio (Roku just passes through anything other than AAC stereo).
Thanks all, that fixed the problem. For posterity, these are the Roku settings that worked best. The Plex server only transcoded the audio, not the video.
