Some h265 media stuttering in Plex Web and other Plex clients

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.32.7.7571 - linuxserver. io/plex:latest
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.116.1

Browser: Vivaldi version 6.2.3105.51 (Stable channel) (64-bit)

I’ve slowly been replacing my old h264 content with h265 content. Over the past week, I’ve had a few of my users report video stuttering issues with playing some (but not all) newly updated h265 content on both Plex Web and certain other clients, like Plex Roku, and I’ve been able to reproduce the issue myself.

For Plex Web, playing at Original quality experiences video stuttering. If I change the quality to Convert Automatically (or anything else, ex 720), the stuttering stops.

In Tautulli
(stuttering) Plex Web → Original:

  • CONTAINER Direct Play (MP4)
  • VIDEO Direct Play (HEVC 1080p)
  • AUDIO Direct Play (English - AAC 5.1)
  • SUBTITLE Transcode (English - SRT → SRT)

(no stuttering) Plex Web → Convert Automatically:
CONTAINER Converting (MP4 → MP4)
VIDEO Transcode (HEVC 1080p → H264 1080p)
AUDIO Transcode (English - AAC 5.1 → AAC Stereo)
SUBTITLE Transcode (English - SRT → ASS)

I had one of my users test with their Roku smart tv and:
Direct Stream checked = stutter
Direct Stream unchecked = no stutter

I did try rolling back to a previous version of PMS (1.32.5.7516) and the issue persisted, but I don’t recall ever having this issue up until about a week ago. It also seems to be intermittent; I was able to reproduce this issue one day on Plex Web, and then the next day when I tried to reproduce again (on Original quality), I was seeing the stream being automatically transcoded to h264. It seems like the clients aren’t supporting h265 media correctly and it should be transcoded to h264, but isn’t always being automatically transcoded. I don’t know that for sure, but since the web client is trying to Direct Play one day and experiencing stuttering, and then transcoding the next day and having no issues, that’s what it seems like to me. Does anyone have any ideas or has anyone experienced a similar issue that can help me fix this?

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Yeah, having the same issue. Not all HEVC files, just some, running on Windows and it stutters on PC, Chromecast as well as Google TV. It does play fine in other players such as VLC, so it seems to be an issue with Plex.

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Finally found someone discussing this. Yes it’s maddening. A significant amount of my h265 content hitches every so often in the web player.

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I still haven’t been able to find an actual fix. The only thing that consistently works is disabling Direct Stream. Unfortunately, since I can’t disable Direct Stream server-wide, I’m having to tell my users to disable it if and when they have issues watching something. Since most of my media is HEVC, it happens pretty frequently.

I plan on rebuilding my Plex server this spring some time. When I do, I’ll post again whether or not it persists on the new hardware.

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I had a random movie that is HEVC start stuttering tonight. I couldn’t figure out why, so I started to look at some other HEVC files. I have found many on my server are having this issue, but not all. They didn’t have this problem before, but I’m not sure when it started because I haven’t watch many movies for a few months. I searched around the internet and found this issue occurring for others in the past months. The issue has something to do with metadata in mp4 files that is causing problems. The fix is to use a tool like mkvtoolnix to change the mp4 container to mkv. It just swaps out the container. I’m not sure if this is your same problem, but it could be something to look into.

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i have the same issue unfortunately…

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