Server Version#: 1.19.5.3112
Player Version#: 8.4.2.19372
I have a synology ds920+ which i setup with a plex server and im using directPlay to playback content on my Sony x900f 4k Android TV.
Most videos playback fine with direct play, but i noticed some of my chucky/heavy 4k videos have buffering every so and so.
My 4k videos are h264, ≈60mbps bitrate and 8bit, 30 fps.
My bandwith is 1gbe. TV is not, but i have 5G wireless, so i get around 140Mbps between it and my server (tested with iPerf3). Additionally, I tested playing back the same videos through SMB with other apps like Kodi and VLC and the 4k videos only present the buffering in plex, so i dont think its a bandwitdh problem.
Realizing this I inspected the plex player side logs, and going through them, I saw that when i playback my 4k videos on it, its downscaling the videos to 1080p, on the server side dashboard, i see the 4k video saying “direct play” for both video and audio though. So im guessing this is client/player side downscaling?
Seeing that, i did some research and found this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/203810286-what-media-formats-are-supported/
And i see that it’s directly called out that “4K content not matching the above properties will be transcoded to 1080p.”
Seems like my problem is my h264 encoding, so I have a few questions.
Are there any remedies for this other than having to transcode all my 4k media to h265?
Does plex have any future plans to support 4k h264 media for direct playback?
Thanks!
