About 2 weeks ago, the Plex app stopped properly streaming on my PS3. All files still stream properly on other devices… PC’s, Roku, Phones, etc. using Plex and using other options, like Windows Media Player. The files even stream just fine using the PS3’s build in video player via DLNA so that’s what has me most baffled. It’s not a buffering issue because I’ve seen that plenty of times in the past using other streaming devices and that has a random aspect to it. I’ve tried playing quite a few video files repeatedly and they play for a few seconds, stop for a second or so, start playing again, stop shortly, over and over and over. It’s almost like it’s NOT streaming but trying to literally just play the video file. I’ve tried installing the latest Plex Media Server on my QNAP server, deleting and re-installing the PS3 app. Nothing changes. This has been working great since I first installed the whole Plex solution this last November so very frustrating it;s just kind of “nuked” all of a sudden…
I turned on logging, tried to play 5 different movies all with the same results, watched Plex app get REALLY slow, turned off Debugging and uploaded the logs here.
the speed of transcode is consistently less than 1.0 so your server isn’t or can’t transcode in real time. which is what would cause buffering.
Feb 17, 2017 19:10:42.658 [0xf0623b90] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:58331] 206 PUT /video/:/transcode/session/ejbljq11o3vl3u87c5h7vhd5/progress?progress=0.9&size=-22&speed=0.5&remaining=21046 (4 live) 6ms 289 bytes
which QNAP do you have?
on at least one of your videos ( suicide squad ) it appears to be transcoding video because H264 level is higher than what is is capable or set to.
Feb 17, 2017 18:56:35.881 [0xecda1b90] WARN - [ui-ps3-ps3] [MDE] Invalid profile property; level: 41 > 40
Hello BigWheel,
I have a TS-451 which I bumped the RAM up to 8GB from 4GB when I bought it over a year ago. It comes with a default Plex Media Server app and as I mentioned above, and worked perfectly fine up until about 2 weeks ago. Over Christmas I had sometimes 3 different TV’s going in different rooms all streaming and transcoding video just fine. I believe it is related to the most recent update to Plex Media Server I upgraded to. It is the only variable in this equation given no hardware has changed, there is no problem transcoding to any other device (PC, Phones, etc) and the PS3 app hasn’t changed. It’s the Plex Media Server. There can’t be any other explanation when I’m able to stream the EXACT same movies from the QNAP to the same PS3 and play them with no issue in the default PS3 video player.
More to the point, I’ve gone back to other movies I watched a month or so ago before I upgraded the Plex Media Server that played with no issue and THOSE don’t work via Plex either.
So what exactly would cause the transcode to slow down or become more processor intensive, short of the Plex Servers code in processing video? I have played around with the server settings a bit and I’m not going to say it couldn’t be some setting I changed? I was hoping upgrading the QNAP firmware would fix something but that didn’t help either.
~Michael
to be very clear. what you can play over DLNA has absolutely nothing to do with what can be played over third party apps such as ours. Sony restricts some things to their players only and third party apps are not allowed. for example only the device player can play mp3 files. no other app can. that is a Sony limitation on third party apps so we have to transcode mp3 audio into acc in an mp4 video container just for a simple MP3 to be played.
anyway. what are your transcoding settings set to? in settings>Server>transoder i don’t know of anything specific that changed in transcoder in recent version to affect it that much
in the PS app you can change max H264 level in Settings.Video. the PS3 can;t really handle thigns above 4.0 but you can change to something higher if you want to give that a try
I now have empirical evidence it’s specifically the Plex Media Server transcode code.
I enabled the setting in the Plex Media Server:
Settings --> Server --> Update Channel --> I changed this to Plex Pass. It showed me an upgrade.
So I upgraded from PlexMediaServer_1.1.4.2757-24ffd60_x86.qpkg to PlexMediaServer_1.4.1.3362-77c6a4f80_x86.qpkg
This was the ONLY thing I changed. I then immediately checked the Suicide Squad video mentioned above and it didn’t stop half as much, though still did (and these were shorter stops), enough to still make it unwatchable. I did however go back and try a few other videos I had previously tried that we exhibiting problems and a few actually played for about a minute with no noticeable stuttering or stopping (so I assumed they’t play through) and a few others had less stopping or more of a stutter (less than a second) than completely stopping for 1-2 seconds.
I went through and tried over a dozen different movies and formats in various sizes. I tried a sampling of my Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, and Star Wars movies, all in MKV for mat and all in the 8-10 GB range and short of a single initial stutter about 2 seconds in all of the movies, all started playing for as long as I watched (a minute or two) with no stopping. So based on this, you absolutely can’t say my hardware has any issues transcoding as the files sized are 3 times the size of Suicide Squad!
I also tried a sampling of other formats and sizes with some mixed results. For example, The BFG, about 3.48 GB MKV stopped a few times and I was about to give up when it just started playing fine for over 120 seconds before I stopped watching. The first thing that came to mind was the transcoding on the other movies was sucking up processing power still?
So what I would also like to bring up is questioning the fact the more I sampled 60-120 seconds of full size movies, the SLOWER the Plex interface became. When I hit stop on the BFG movie (the last I tested), it took almost a full minute to bring me back to the intro screen and another minute to let me go back to the list of movies and that would scroll a bit and then hang.
That leaves me with some additional questions… because the new version seems to significantly change the transcoding part (to start working again), is there something possibly caching on the initial set of movies I tested preventing them from playing properly now with the newer transcode settings? Is there a memory leak or something to do with the transcode bogging down the interface if you try to play a string of movies in a row for a minute or two?
What I can say for certainty though, is when it comes specifically to the PS3 interface, this new update is a good step to bringing it back to working 100%. I’m more than happy to privately test any other builds of the Plex Media Server for QNAP or generate newer LOG files if they can be of assistance…
in the PS app you can change max H264 level in Settings.Video. the PS3 can;t really handle thigns above 4.0 but you can change to something higher if you want to give that a try
Just to clarify, I was using what we’ve been discussing just fine for months with not a single issue until I upgraded the Plex Media Server. I watched the very large Lord of the Rings, Hobbit and Star Wars movies over the Christmas holiday with no problems. I’m not sure how many other people are using a QNAP via a PS3 anymore (perhaps a PS4 might not exhibit the issues?) but again if there is anything I can do to help what’s going on…
in the PS app you can change max H264 level in Settings.Video. the PS3 can;t really handle thigns above 4.0 but you can change to something higher if you want to give that a try
I changed what you suggested from 4.0 to 3.2, as well as changing the Local Quality setting down from Original, to 8 Mbps 1080p, and still no luck. But if those settings were a factor, it’d be hanging on those other much larger files I tested that had no issues.
And I’m not above chalking some measure of this up to the encoding of these files, specifically the Suicide Squad one but in all fairness I was having issues with files that played just fine previously and a significant chunk of the issues cleared up by upgrading the Plex Media Server. I will try to get a couple different copies of the Suicide Squad movie (different file sizes and formats too) which should eliminate any caching aspect or any other transcoding factors.
I managed to watch a movie most of the way through on the PS3 yesterday (using LAN), and there were a few spots that the movie stopped playing completely, but I managed to skip ahead 30 seconds and it picked up again. But then with about 27 minutes remaining, it suddenly fast forwarded through the remainder of the movie and wouldn’t play it from that point on no matter what.
I went to my Roku which is on WiFi further away in a different room and it was playing the movie fine (so a slower connection, and same transcoding from the QNAP) and it had no problem fast forwarding and playing the remainder of the movie as well as playing the sections that glitched on the PS3.
So there are some serious issues now in relation with Plex serving content to a PS3. Being the PS3 app hasn’t changed, it has to be the code in the QNAP Media Server component.
