HI - I have a large Movie and TV show library and use plex effortlessly from within my local network … It feeds my plex app on my amazon firestick beautifully. I am out of the house and brought my firestick with me and transcoding creates buffering. For fun I added DS video to amazon firestick set to “no transcoding” and VLC as a player (when DS video can’t direct play the file) and POW … no buffering. DS Video is not nearly as good as plex for scraping but it works when I’m outside my local network. I will now have the metadata twice on my NAS. So here is the crux of my questions…
Can I point the metadata needed for DS video to the folder with the plex data that is already there and beautifully selected?
I would prefer to turn off transcoding and set the player plex uses to VLC (on my firestick and iOS devices), this would fix my problem, is this possible? If it is not, I would love to send in a suggestion … imagine how powerful it would be to be able to select VLC as your player on any of the devices you are using plex.
As for your specific questions… the short answer is: No!
Synology’s video station can use the iGPU on certain ARM based models while Plex will only be able to use hw-accelerated transcoding on Intel based DiskStations. I guess that’s the difference in performance/playback behavior you experience.
You cannot simply point either app to a folder of the other for it to magically pick up the data. That’s like spinning the tape of a cassette around your CD player because it also contains music
You might be able to use VLC if you enable Plex’ DLNA server (Settings > [Server Name] > DLNA). However DLNA can only work inside your home network, not remotely.
On a more general note…
You might want to review your server and client settings to rule out unnecessary transcoding. Most clients default to 2 Mbps remote streaming video quality – this will cause the video to be transcoded if you have a higher quality video.
The same can happen if you set a bitrate restriction in your server’s remote access options (Settings > [Server Name] > Remote Access > Limit remote stream bitrate.
Thx Tom – Any chance PLEX would allow other media players (like vlc) to be set to play with plex … vlc can play anything without the transcoding so for my x265 files it works great … size is small so bandwidth not an issue.
This is where client selection can play a big role. Shield can pretty much play anything… AppleTV plays most things (you can add Infuse and it can talk to Plex and playback like VLC) … Roku and Firestick end up with some limits but support most of the more common formats. The more you know your file formats and the client support for them the easier it’ll be for you to avoid transcoding for sure.
Definitely check the remote stream settings on the client and the same on the server side in Plex like @tom80H mentioned - that’s a common cause of buffering and DS Video doesn’t really do that type of limit setting so could be where you skipped the buffering.
You can also plan ahead a bit and optimize files ahead of time if the buffer is from transcoding - that will help avoid transcoding on the fly.
