For the past 8 years I have used Plex Media Server and Plex Player (in one form or another) on the same machine that has been through many an upgrade.
Right now I am running an i7 with GTX 1080 with Plex Media Server and Plex Media Player on Windows 10, never in my life have I had anything transcode.
Tonight every movie that I play in PMP is being transcoded. You can tell right off the bat because the quality is terrible, going into activity confirms transcoding of video and audio. I have absolutely no idea why things are starting to be transcoded, the only plugin I use (and have used for years) is Sub Zero.
If I play the same movies in PMS web player then there is no transcoding, it has just happened out of the blue for PMP on the same system.
Iâve updated drivers and turned on and off almost every setting in PMP and just testing a few movies I noticed that direct play is fine for any HEVC files, but anything with H264 is being transcoded asâŠ
Video: Transcoding H264 (HW) to H264 (hw)
Audio Transcoding TrueHD to OPUS
As you can also see, my fully capable Atmos/DTX receiver is now only receiving Stereo Opus audio not matter what the audio in the file is.
Has anyone else has the same issue? Any idea what is going on?
PMS and PMP are both latest versions, Plex Pass Channels.
So after testing the same files on my Apple TV and seeing that the video is direct played, and then installing Open PHT and also seeing the that file is direct played, then I can only surmise that there is a bug in the latest version of Plex which is causing it to force PMS to transcode.
I have tried rolling back to a previous version of Plex, but since they make it so hard to do so I am struggling.
I just managed to revert back to 2.22, no transcoding whatsoever. Must be a bug or a âfeatureâ in the latest version that is causing PMS to transcode.
Looking at the PMP log, it seems that PMP thinks the Bitrate of the video is too high? So i donât think it makes a difference is the file is H264 or H265, it is just if the bitrate > 3,000 then it cannot direct play in PMP 2.24?
So I have been able to fix this by adding the very LAN network and localhost that the computer hosting PMP and PMS are on. No idea what was introduced in PMP 2.24 to make this necessary when it has never been needed in the past.
usually when i have seen PMP transcoding in the last its the DNS rebind issue which in turn makes PMP thinking it was external and then using the âRemoteâ quality setting in PMP, which by default is set to transcode
Hmmm, well i wouldnât even know where to start. As i have mentioned, this is only a problem with 2.24 and both PMS and PMP are on the same physical computer. I canât understand why a rebind issue would only affect a certain version of PMP?
it looks to me its what i said, your router probably has DNS rebind protection, and PMP
is âconnecting via the WAN IPâ which then makes PMP use the Remote quality settings in PMP (default it transcode), based on this log entry below
Hey @dan-the-man - That Nottflix server is actually a friends remote server that I donât really use. My server is named Chulu and it is that one that is local.
A couple of tweaks seemed to fix it, but i still doesnât make sense to me. I very much believe it to be a bug that is being triggered by a certain set of circumstances.
Specifically IPV6 off and List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth being the first three octet of your network address with the gateway.
It SHOULDNâT need this because it has never needed it in the past, and it doesnât make any sense that a player on the very same machine as the server needs network config, but itâs a bug and it does
For network changes I think it is always recommended to restart PMS. And considering the kinda ridiculous nature of this bug, possibly even worth restarting the machine.
Also try just: 192.168.1/254 - Leaving out the last octet of the IP address seems to work for me, but not when I include it. Go figure?
I have the same issue, random transcoding, meaning not everything I watch is transcoded but some things are. I will make the network changes you propose and see if it helps. Thanks for your troubleshooting!
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