Rare issue - degrading frame rate

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
21

I have this issue as well on my Xbox Plex App. It appears to happen after pause/fast forward/rewind. On rare occasions, it’s from the get go. As soon as I start playing a video, it will have a degraded frame rate. Force quitting the Xbox Plex App appears to have no effect. Restarting the Plex Media Server (not the physical server but just the service/application) appears to fix it. There seems to be no pattern as to when it starts/stops working.

My setup is below:

FreeNAS Server

  • Lenovo TS440 Server
  • Intel Xeon CPU E3-1245 V3 @ 3.40Ghz
  • 32GB Crucial ECC Memory
  • Mobo - Not sure on Mobo but it came w/ Lenovo TS440 Server
  • 8x 5TB WD Red HDD in RaidZ2 (Roughly 40TB Raw, 27TB Accessible after Z2)
  • 2x 256GB Samsung Evo 850 SSD in Mirror
  • RAID Controller: RAID 500 (Discrete, 0/1/10) - AKA MegaRAID 9240-8i RAID Controller Card

Plex runs on the SSDs on its own. All of my media is housed on the other pool. This was not an issue for years but has plagued me for the last 6-8 months.

22

It is because of nonsense done when forming output stream. Try smaller streams. Smaller streams will result in less degradation. At 20Mbps degradation is barely visible and 12Mbps probably will be gone. This has nothing to do with server hardware - same 60Mbps stream easily handled by TV Plex app.
And on the other hand heave 40Mbps stream from YouTube will be handled by console normally. It is Plex for Xbox problem. I have no capability to visually correlate degradation with bandwidth changes, at least right now.

23

I don’t think stream size has much to do with it. I get this problem at random spots throughout every movie I put on. Most noticeable when the camera pans on a scene. It turns into a slideshow. It also happens EVERY time I pause/resume.

All my movies are 1080p or lower H265 with 640kb or lower AC3 audio, no subtitles, in an MP4 container. Not one of them has a higher video bitrate than 3.7mb.

When it happens, I find that just pressing the left direction on my remote to skip back 10secs clears it up 9 times out of 10.

24

Does Plex transcode video part of the stream?

25

Everything I have is Direct Play.

26

Then you should check your network connectivity.