I want to pick the community brain on this as i go through and troubleshoot myself. i have Plex server on a windows 10 box in my garage, hooked to a gigabit switch back into the house. One goes to another win 10 desktop and the other goes to my appleTV gen4.
Now i felt like I had been fine for awhile and the only thing that changed was i combined two libraries into one.(easier navigation) Last night on AppleTV I noticed pretty badly that movies were choppy, worse so with real fast action. Thinking just uptime for either i rebooted the AppleTV and plex server but when they came back up still an issue. I checked the settings and the default 1080p 8Mbps was in place, so then i went to the Windows 10 desktop and pulled up the web interface, there it looked perfectly fine. This was across 3 action movies, one in SD was very very choppy…un-watchable.
The resources for the server seemed to be in good shape, if it was the server i should have had an issue on both devices. Anyone experience something like this? Do I go down the avenue of network switch causing some kind of latency? Or is it possible Plex didn’t like my doubling the size of one of the libraries?
What i have not tried yet is another library, or if i created a new one with just those movies. .mp4 is the format.
The optimal scenario is ‘Original Quality’ on the client device app. We hope that means direct play at the source bit rate. Maybe not.
Whatever looks the worst is probably being transcoded because your device isn’t happy with it’s current make up and tells Plex it needs a transcode. Direct Play material is just handed over as-is. No middle man.
To determine what’s happening play something on something then open Plexweb/Status/Now Playing/hit the ‘i’ and see what’s happening. Make the changes necessary to get whatever is in transcode to direct play and you’re golden (may be easier said than done - but isn’t everything?)
So setting to ‘original quality’ sets it to direct play as you mentioned. I am looking around for the ‘i’ in now playing but i’m not finding it. I hope its not cause i don’t have the premium.
I will test this out tonight and follow up with whatever (if anything) i discover.
If something’s playing there’s a window with some grabs strobing by… on that should be an ‘i’. Clicking that should bring up some details.
I’m not familiar with the Fruit Cup over there, but if it has an ‘Information Overlay’ you can activate (hit OK when something playing, and see if there’s a ‘Gear’ around somewhere to click) it should give you some info on what’s happening to the stream that’s in progress.
Found it! my kids are watching something now and i see video = direct and audio = transcode (ac3) i’ll follow up when i have more. thanks for the help.
Sorry i wasn’t able to get back sooner, busy w/ work. So that night and last night same movies absolutely no issues. Something transient but at least i learned some better ways to troubleshoot going forward.
