Server Version: 4.116.1
Player Version: iPhone 8.30
Problem
Hello, I am having issues with transcoding on my Plex server. Any time I try to play media that requires transcoding, my Plex player has initial load of anywhere between 10 and 45 seconds. After the initial load, it plays perfectly fine and never buffers. I don’t understand why the initial load is so long.
Replicating Issue
To try to exemplify this, I tried to play an anime on my iPhone. The anime is 1080p, and I set Plex to reduce the quality a lower bitrate of still 1080p (so it is forced to transcode). I did a screen recording, which you can find here, and I got some Plex server debug logs too, which you can find here.
Following the timestamps in the logs:
- I started playback at around 16:11:55. On my phone, the playback starts off looking frozen (no loading).
- It starts actually loading (you see the spinner) at around 16:12:07.
- Finally, at 16:12:42, the anime starts playing on my phone.
I also took a closer look at the logs and I noticed during the first initial load where the playback seems frozen w/o loading spinner (16:11:55 - 16:12:07), I noticed a lot of repeated Loaded sym: ... messages. Why are the same things getting loaded over and over again for 12 seconds? I also did some more testing and noticed the Plex Transcoder process is only spawned in my container when the loading spinner shows up (16:12:07). So it spends 12 seconds doing what exactly??
I should say it doesn’t matter what player I use (TV, phone, laptop…), or whether it’s transcoding 4K → 720p or 1080p → 1080p (lower bitrate), as long as transcoding is involved, this always happens. My server is set to use hardware transcoding and my server has a Geforce RTX 3050 Ti, which should be more than enough for my needs (looking at server monitoring, when transcoding, only a max of 30% of my GPU is ever used). My CPU is also only ever using 5-10%, so that is not a problem either. This is also all happening on my home network (not internet), so bandwidth is not a bottleneck either.
Server Specs
Plex server: OMEN by HP Laptop 16-c0001np
GPU: RTX 3050 Ti
Storage: WD Elements 18 TB (external HDD)
OS: Windows 11 64-bit
Setup: Docker for Windows (WSL 2) w/ Docker Compose
The plex service on my Docker Compose:
plex:
image: linuxserver/plex:1.32.8
container_name: plex
networks:
- media
environment:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
- TZ=America/Edmonton
- NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
- NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,video,utility
deploy:
resources:
reservations:
devices:
- driver: nvidia
count: all
capabilities: [gpu]
volumes:
- plex-config:/config
- torrent-downloads:/downloads
ports:
- 32400:32400
restart: unless-stopped
Here are also some images with my plex transcoder settings and some hardware monitoring while playbacking media using hardware transcoding
