Server Version#: 1.16.4.1469
Player Version#: 3.104.2
Hey guys, I’ve got a weird one for you. When direct playing high bitrate (>11Mbps) content on macos with content coming from a remote server, the stream buffers very often and has bad audio. My download speeds are well into the hundreds of Mbps, consistent, and I don’t have any other apps running.
Before you just dismiss this as being a server-side upload speed issue, the server can deliver content that’s transcoded at 20Mbps with no issues. This happens both with both the (up to date) Plex Media Player and the new Plex app. The server can also transcode bitrates higher than 11Mbps no problem to my phone.
To investigate this a bit further I took a look at the data provided by Tautulli while streaming a bunch of different titles, and eliminated any possibility that it was related to file type, container, video, audio, or subtitles. It all seemed to be connected to the quality; if it was direct played and had a bitrate above 11Mbps it had buffering/audio problems with no exceptions.
I also took a look at my computer’s network data for Plex while streaming these, and it was unusually steady with no drops at 11.9Mbps.
This all seems to point to some sort of limit, but this limit was broken with the earlier transcodes and I don’t have plex premium so even If I wanted to limit bandwidth I wouldn’t be able to.
Any thoughts about how I could fix this would be very much appreciated, thank you!
