Hi Everyone,
I am still working through the forums and trying to get to the bottom of my problem. My issue is trying to isolate where my problem is (i.e. is it something local or something external). I guess my question is about where the bottleneck is for what I am trying to do with PLEX and consequently what is ruining my current experience.
I am using PLEX in 2 ways
The first way is for my local media that is locally hosted. I have a Windows box running PMS and I use the PLEX android app to access my content and cast to my Google Chromecast Ultra. The only “wifi” is the android device, everything else is on a hardwired connection on the same network. This doesn’t seem to have any issues.
The second way is that there is media I access remotely. I access the content much the same way (i.e. android app, cast to Google Chromecast). However when viewing this media externally I am having a transcoding nightmare. Content will start playing and after about 40-50 seconds I will get that dreaded pause (buffering) and it will play again for a few seconds and then show the error about not enough resources to transcode the video.
Reviewing the logs I can see that (I think) the plex android app is attempting to do the transcoding which obviously will not have enough resources and hence I start getting the above error. I also checked for any lost packets and I can confirm that there is no packet loss so I can rule out bandwidth saturation (at least from the client log). I believe my main issue here is that the android Plex app is my bottleneck as it is not direct playing and attempting to transcode. I have configured the Plex app to be at Maximum to try and force it to direct play. If I look at the logs, the logs seem to indicate (as an example) that the video it is trying to play is 1920 x 1080 but then it is upscaling it to 2560 (which I think is 1 problem). I isolated the Chromecast by just using the android Plex app to ensure I was seeing the same problem.
What I would like to know is there a way I can force the Android Plex app to not attempt to transcode (I know there is an ongoing article that has been running for months that doesn’t look like it will get to any resolution any time soon). Is there a way to hand off the Android Plex app to maybe my local PMS so that it can be responsible for playback and not my phone? Would this resolve my whole issue around the direct stream etc?
The remote server is apparently configured with direct play so I am trying to find a resolution to my whole issue. I am stuck trying to watch my remote content. I also have the same problem with another device we have being an Apple iPhone that exhibits the same behaviour. Putting these events together I think the issue is likely the remote server but I am trying to see if there is anything that can be done locally to definitively proof that it is the remote server.
