Streaming movies from FreeNAS Plex (4K Video) always buffers every 10~20 seconds

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488
Player Version#: WebOS Latest version or web client 3.77.4

Hi Guys. This is the hardware i’m currently using.

Intel E5-2637 v3 paired with 64GB of ecc Memory
Running over a giga router/switch system and using cat 5e wires

I’m getting buffering sessions every 20 seconds or so when the player is transocding the following:
Video HEVC to H264
Audio AC3 to AAC

Is this normal or is there some settings that can optimize my system?
If this isn’t normal, what kind of processor will allow for real time transcoding of blu-ray level remuxes?

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If I got it correctly this processor does not support Intel Quick Sync so you won’t be able to use Hardware Transcoding, if you’re transcoding 4k hevc->h264 then yeah I would expect buffering.

Can you show a bit more details on why its transcoding though IIRC hevc should be supported in webos, logs would show this, but just looking in the new server Dashboard while playing might be enough.

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Hi Mike,
Thanks for letting me know about Quick Sync.
Would any processor that can support Quick Sync tech be able to transcode hevc to h264 on the fly? If not, then what kind would allow for this kind of transcoding performance? Would having subtitles enabled affect this?

The dashboard you are mentioning is the freenas dashboard? If so, i only see 60% usage when transcoding with sometimes shooting up to 125% (not sure why that is)

Let me know if you need any other info. I would love to be able have a freenas build that can transcode on the fly.

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No I meant Plex “Server Dashboard” in settings.

As for cpu the more recent the better our support page has some details on this, but this pretty much sums it up:
Earlier generations of hardware typically have lower-quality output than newer generations. (For instance, output from a “Sandy Bridge” processor typically won’t look as good as from a “Kabylake” processor.)

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I just tested on some movies. Pgs subtitles in the Remux 4k videos causes buffering issues while srt downloaded from opensub wouldn’t cause this issue. Is Pgs subs that much harder to run?

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Yes, it requires subs to be “burned in” while transcoding, so with PGS regardless of the player support you would always see Transcoding and it explains buffering, if you can use another format or no subs at all you might get it to direct play if the app supports both HEVC and the audio codec in use (which seems to be the case)

so tl;dr yes pgs (and other image type subs) are much harder to run.

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So if I want to run pgs with 4k video I would need to look at quick sync cpu or would this still be too hard for current processors to handle?

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Depends, in OSX I.E. we can do Hardware Transcoding even with pgs subs, but if its a 4k 10 bit HDR stream I still see some buffering in my macbook pro i.e (Kalby Lake processor)

A normal (meaning not 10bit HDR) stream plays fine even with PGS, and the same but with a downloaded srt also plays nice! So it still depends on the content we are talking about, and I’m not 100% sure of the implications in FreeBSD as support was just recently added.

So its kind of a “yes” a quick sync (very recent cpu) would help you a lot, but if its just for this use case, maybe just using srt’s solves the problem w/o spending money

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