I had setup Plex (free) on my QNAP NAS… Its port forwarded, but firewalled to certain IPs on the Internet.
I travelled to my parents, setup PLEX on their TV and signed in. Over xmas I happily watched several movies (blueray) problem-free.
Yesterday I purchased a Plex Pass to support the product. Since then, when I play a blueray, plex pauses as though its buffering every 2-3 minutes.
Logging into the NAS remotely, its CPU is ~50%… memory is 5Gb free (of 8Gb). Monitoring the bandwidth on both my NAS and my home Router its transmitting at a very low bitrate 1-2Mbps, but my home connections capable of 15Mbps. My parents ISP is capable of 30Mbps downlink. 32400 is forwarded on both TCP and UDP. When it plays the quality of the video is high, but it just stutters every 1-2mins.
Right now I can’t see why the transmit bitrate is so low or why plex pauses.
Also, I’ve noticed the server GUI being temperamental as to if I’m in Remote mode or Relay. I can access the /web gui with no problem. But the GUI can’t seem to decide if Remote is enabled or disabled often saying “disabled” when its not.
I’ll keep trying some of the same blue-rays that played before (currently Superman II stutters). Anyone have any advice ?
update: I’ve been playing the same movie from the a laptop on the same LAN at my parents and it too pauses every few mins (720, 2Mbps). So it doesn’t look like its strictly the PC thats the issue.
So I’ve been streaming/watching content all day, but everytime I try to watch this one movie it stutters like this. I’m new-ish to Plex so if anyone has ideas on why this would happen I’m open…
I’ve been playing with bandwidth settings on my NAS all day and its not being taxed at all in memory, CPU or network.
The Superman 2 video codec is VC-1 on the bad file which may also be the issue if your tv doesn’t support it. The Guardians is h264 video
Your reference frames are set to 1 on the bad file instead of 4 or 5 and the level on the bad file is set to advanced 3 instead of 4.1 high.
I am guessing that there is no MOV atom(optimized for streaming) in the bad file as well.
I would redo this bad file with the same settings as the Guardians file.
Again, I believe the issue is with the way the file was encoded.
thanks I will check all of those when I can… The process for ripping both discs was the same… Pretty much 100% automated with MakeMKV, but maybe theres some options.
I’ll also try to spot another VC1 type file and see if that has the same issues.
I’ll also need to read up on what “reference frames” and a MOV atom are.
The Samsung TV will play the video, and it is a good quality viewing when it plays, but it just pauses every few minutes and then re-buffers. I also see the same issue playing it via the web interface on my laptop too so I don’t think its limited to just the TV. But thanks for your help!
When it comes to the VC-1 codec, the decoder Plex uses is limtied to 1 thread and therefore stuck to 1 logical core.
On your laptop try using PMP instead as this I believe if I remember correctly has native support for VC-1, therefore shouldn’t cause the file to transcode.
Your NAS will not transcode this quick enough to display anywhere I believe.
VC-1 can bring a lower powered Plex Server to a grinding halt. When you rip the movie and see a VC-1 codec, I recommend using handbrake to convert that to H.264.
Do you think there would be much quality difference between the VC-1 and H264 codecs ?
I’ve been trying to keep my source files as close to the original as possible
