Plex Transcoding working everywhere but the server itself

So I’m a complete newbie on this, but I’m happy to do my best to provide anything that would help figuring out the issue. I have a newborn about a month old, so it’s been difficult to find decent chunks of time to sit down with this. I’m sure more information will need to be provided, but here’s a quick break down of the issue I’m having.

I recently set up a plex server with plex pass on a desktop PC I had laying around. It has an I3 2120 cpu with a passmark score of just under 4000 and an AMD Radeon 7450. Not great, but sufficient for my purposes until I upgrade next year and make the switch from Windows 7.

I also have roku’s, phones and tablets, but in my home theatre, I had planned to have the server do double duty of also being my main playback device there. For the most part it has worked flawlessly for about a week, until I hit 2 files in particular… I’m sure there’s more in my collection like this, but I haven’t gone through and tried them all.

In playing these two I was getting fairly choppy play back on one, and the other wouldn’t load at all with the spinning icon just spinning away. In settings I can see they are transcoding, not playing original, and in the dashboard it’s showing my cpu usage at 100%.

I could understand if my cpu just isn’t up to task and can’t handle the transcoding, but the part that I’m confused about is that these two files play perfectly on my roku 3, android phone and tablet. I even tried it remotely at work just now on my phone via remote wifi and both files played perfectly.

Is there something obvious I’m missing here that these files would play fine everywhere but the server itself? Any direction I can be pointed? Thanks!

Which Plex app are you using to play the media?
You should not use the default web app, because a web browser is the worst environment for a video player. It will require transcoding on the server far too often (and needlessly so).

Download and install Plex Media Player additionally to Plex server.
Download available below.

I see what you mean. How did I miss that!?!?. Yes, it appears I have only been using the server web client from initial set up of the server. I didn’t realize until now that there is a separate Windows 7 “Media Player” app as a download available at the link below.

https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/?_ga=2.269079281.1277414651.1557874113-1128798794.1557417118#plex-app

I assume this is the first thing I should try before bothering with anything else and will likely be the obvious simple solution.

Try it!

It has 2 modes, btw.
One is looking just like the web app,
the other looks like the Plex smart tv app. That is the one which is compatible with remote controls.
pmp_fullscreen

Great, I’ll try it out tonight after work and see how it goes. Thanks for the info!

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