I have the QNAP TS-469L 4-Bay NAS and run the Plex app (updated to latest version) to stream my media library to my PS4. I have it hardwired from my office, up through the attic, to the living room, to a 4 port hub, split to the PS4. Networking shouldn’t be an issue, but I am not 100% sure on that one. I stream movies and TV shows and usually have pretty large files. I tend to go for 5.1 DTS audio with 1080p video. Some of the videos are about 20+ Gigabytes. The video plays normally most of the time, but it does get bogged down when streaming through the PS4 and ends up stuttering for a few minutes. If I pause the video and resume, it clears up sometimes. I am just curious what is the hold up? I modify the settings to play the video at its original rate instead of the recommended rate…so it doesn’t have to do any transcoding, but I am not sure I understand that completely. I just want to be able to pop on a movie with full surround sound and video at 1080p and have no stuttering or blips. How do I guarantee smooth play-throughs?
Answered @ the QNAP forums
OP tried to play medias with a very high bitrate and DTS Sound, and that’s not supported by PS4
The QNAP in spe is an Intel® Atom™ 2.13 GHz Dual-core Processor based one, with a benchmark of 839, which means it’s below recommandation
for a smooth transcode
/T
Great information. How do I ensure that THIS is turned on? I don’t see it anywhere on the web browser interface:
“DTS audio is not currently supported directly. Content with DTS audio will have the audio automatically transcoded to either AAC (default) or AC3 (if the Dolby Digital (AC3) receiver capability preference is enabled) by the Plex Media Server in order to preserve the surround sound audio channels.”
Besides that, I have begun adjusting my library to be MP4 format with only AAC 5.1 audio. Seems to be fixing the issue…just have a lot to replace. Thanks for the information!
I think you’re asking how to enable AC3 audio on the PS4 because DTS isn’t supported. Here’s goes, hope I’m right. On the home screen open Settings from under you user avatar. In there select Audio > Dolby Digital AC3.
Oh ok thanks! I will look into that tonight. I got a movie last night (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and watched it. It was a 1080p movie, MP4 format, AAC/AC3 Dual Audio. I pulled it up on plex on the PS4 and changed the settings for the movie…(manually, because I haven’t figured out how to make movies default to certain settings)…to play AC3 and the recommended bitrate for the video (around 3.9). Everything seemed to play smoothly, until I decided to turn on subtitles (for the parts that had the russians on the boat). The movie immediately started stuttering again and would not clear up until I disabled them. How would an SRT file cause that much stuttering? Or was that just a fluke accident?
That one unfortunately I think I know the answer to. The Playstation client doesn’t support any type of soft subtitles as far as I know, so in order to use them the server has to switch to transcoding the video.
My giant, already ripped, anime collection weeps. In my case all I have is image-based subtitles that even my Samsung TV’s client doesn’t support. I don’t suppose there’s any hope for support for that on Playstation, since it sounds like there’s a new version incoming…? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Had to ask. 
I’m an anime fan too. Fansubs got me into collecting/curating/watching videos in the first place.
I think image based subtitles (vobsub?) still require transcoding in our soft sub implementation. The soft sub approach used by our Web app only supports text based subtitles. It sounds like image based subtitles are possible but we have a fair bit of work to make it happen.
At the end of the day, the more often we can avoid transcoding the happier we’ll all be.
Now if devices had 10bit support!
@androvsky our transcoder expert also happens to have a health appetite for anime. He pointed me to Subresync as a tool to possible OCR your subs. I’ve tried similar tools in the past with varied success. But, maybe the state of the art has progressed!
Wow, I had no idea those tools existed before, thanks. It seems like such computational overkill for such a simple need, but there it is (there’s probably a much more obvious use case I’m missing). I’ll have to mess with those programs on some of the shows I’ve watched already to see how stable they are.
