Server Version#: 1.16.1.1246
I have scoured the internet and exhausted all my options at this point. I am running a PMS on Windows 10, mainly to make my life easier, but a few of my friends also have access to it, so the userbase is a lowly 4, and apart from me, nobody is THAT active on the server either way.
The server and my main client in the local network both have gigabit ethernet ports, and they all are connected using Cat7 and an unmanaged gigabit network switch to my router, which has all gigabit ports. I have turned off LSO, and IPv6 in my server side. My server has AMD-FX8350 (Black Edition), 8 cores, 4.0 GHz base clock with 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 745 that I had lying around for years (NVIDIA says it has hybrid HW accelerated HVEC encode/decode capabilities), but since all my clients have 4K HDR displays, the GPU is never an issue . My content is in a 4TB 7200 RPM HDD.
When I am Direct Streaming a 4K HDR movie locally on my Xbox One X (which in turn is connected to my Onkyo Dolby Atmos receiver with bitstream audio passthrough enabled so that all audio decoding is handled by my receiver), I get buffering so much that the movie is practically unwatchable. I checked the streaming info, and apparently, the video was being direct played, but the audio was somehow not in the correct container, so it was being transcoded. My CPU usage doesn’t get more than 17% when doing this, and as expected GPU video encode/decode remains 0% (I have Plex Pass, and HW acceleration enabled).
The transcoder buffer is set to throttle after 180 seconds. I thought my HDD read/write might bottleneck the system, so I moved the transcoding directory to an SSD. No change. Set the transcoder directory to a RAMDisk (6 GB virtual disk, so that I don’t run into space problem), still no change.
I tried it with my TV’s own Plex app. It’s a Roku TV, so it won’t passthrough TrueHD audio. As expected, the video was being direct played, and the audio was being transcoded. Same buffering issues.
When I try it on my laptop web app with the default 720p resolution, the video buffers less frequently, but it still does. Weirdly, the server has absolutely no problem streaming 1080p movies with DTS-MA audio and the works.
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-06-24_05-24-04.zip (2.0 MB)
<Media id="13843" duration="8476224" videoProfile="main 10" videoFrameRate="24p" container="mkv" videoResolution="4k" videoCodec="hevc" audioCodec="truehd" audioChannels="8" aspectRatio="2.35" height="1600" width="3840" bitrate="27752">
<Part id="13856" size="29480048968" duration="8476224" key="/library/parts/13856/1553075886/file.mkv" videoProfile="main 10" container="mkv" requiredBandwidths="63319,59672,52556,46183,40209,38036,35278,32954" deepAnalysisVersion="3" file="placeholder-file-path" exists="1" accessible="1">
<Stream id="18578" language="English" height="1600" width="3840" bitrate="22487" requiredBandwidths="56784,53217,46020,39722,33676,31864,29220,26896" displayTitle="4K (HEVC Main 10 HDR)" refFrames="1" profile="main 10" level="153" frameRate="23.976" colorTrc="smpte2084" colorSpace="bt2020nc" colorRange="tv" colorPrimaries="bt2020" chromaSubsampling="4:2:0" bitDepth="10" languageCode="eng" index="0" codec="hevc" default="1" streamType="1"/>
<Stream id="18579" language="English" bitrate="4279" requiredBandwidths="5843,5700,5303,4871,4627,4442,4281,4281" displayTitle="English (TRUEHD 7.1)" bitDepth="24" languageCode="eng" index="1" codec="truehd" default="1" streamType="2" samplingRate="48000" audioChannelLayout="7.1" channels="8" selected="1"/>
