So last night I was watching movies on my Plex server from my fathers house perfectly (Direct play). This morning we are trying to watch a movie being direct played and it takes about a minute to even get the movie started, when it does get started it skips every minute or two. I should note that I use Sickbeard mp4 converter to change the container to MP4 on all my movies. I did a little bit of testing and found out that It will transcode (MKV) perfectly fine, but when its direct play, it lags like crazy. Ive even tried movies that were working perfectly last night and they are extremely slow today. Ive emptied my trash from plex and this didn’t fix the issues. I only have about 50 movies in my plex library/external hard drive. I have run out of ideas on what I can do to fix this.
The server and client are both at your father’s house?
@kegobeer-plex said:
The server and client are both at your father’s house?
No, the server is at my house and the client is at my fathers. When I play a movie locally (on my computer at home), it works fine. Ive tried streaming on multiple platforms on multiple networks and it seems that I just can’t direct play without issues anymore.
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.
@kegobeer-plex said:
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.
I pay for 60 Mb/s service, no sure about the upstream or pipe. Would that be on my service provider bill? Also I was just direct playing last night with no issue, so this is a new problem I’m having.
@Rockapella said:
@kegobeer-plex said:
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.I pay for 60 Mb/s service, no sure about the upstream or pipe. Would that be on my service provider bill?
Probably not. But you can open speedtest.net and get an indication of your upload speed.
Then you also need to take into account your father’s download speed and possibly if the client he uses is wired or wireless.
@Rockapella said:
@kegobeer-plex said:
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.I pay for 60 Mb/s service, no sure about the upstream or pipe. Would that be on my service provider bill?
You can go to the ISP’s website and find your plan. Downstream of 60 meg means you probably have a 4 or 5 meg upstream, that’s pretty standard. There’s no way you can do a direct stream that way, the pipe just isn’t big enough. If you change the client from original to something like 4mb/720, does it work then?
@kegobeer-plex said:
@Rockapella said:
@kegobeer-plex said:
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.I pay for 60 Mb/s service, no sure about the upstream or pipe. Would that be on my service provider bill?
You can go to the ISP’s website and find your plan. Downstream of 60 meg means you probably have a 4 or 5 meg upstream, that’s pretty standard. There’s no way you can do a direct stream that way, the pipe just isn’t big enough. If you change the client from original to something like 4mb/720, does it work then?
Yeah that’s the speed speedtest gives me for upload. the movies I am trying to play are 2mb typically. When I lower the quality to 1.5mb/720, it is doing the same thing with lagging.
@HitsVille said:
@Rockapella said:
@kegobeer-plex said:
What kind of pipe do you have at your house? Are you on fiber or have some huge outgoing pipe? I’ve never been able to direct stream from a different location since I don’t have a plan that can handle upstream of 30+Mb/s.I pay for 60 Mb/s service, no sure about the upstream or pipe. Would that be on my service provider bill?
Probably not. But you can open speedtest.net and get an indication of your upload speed.
Then you also need to take into account your father’s download speed and possibly if the client he uses is wired or wireless.
My dad has the exact same service as me and is direct wired into the client he is using. Looks like 60mb download and 6 upload.
I also get “your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video. Check your network or try a lower quality.”, but that doesn’t make since both our networks are relatively good.
@Rockapella said:
I also get “your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video. Check your network or try a lower quality.”, but that doesn’t make since both our networks are relatively good.
Attempting to send a 30mb stream through a 6mb pipe just doesn’t work. When you get that message, the server is struggling with doing the transcoding necessary. What hardware is running your server?
First, the container doesn’t matter; the underlying codec does. The ideal situation so that Plex will direct play would be a mkv container with x264/h264 for video and something like DD or DTS for audio. MKV is the most flexible and preferred container at this time.
@kegobeer-plex said:
@Rockapella said:
I also get “your connection to the server is not fast enough to stream this video. Check your network or try a lower quality.”, but that doesn’t make since both our networks are relatively good.Attempting to send a 30mb stream through a 6mb pipe just doesn’t work. When you get that message, the server is struggling with doing the transcoding necessary. What hardware is running your server?
So when I set the movie as 2mbps/720p, it works fine. Its only when its set to original that it has this issue. How do I find out what the mbps is for “original”? Also when I change the quality to 2mbps/720p it begins transcoding, which I assume is because it needs to change the quality to something lower. Is there a way I can make sure the movies I have are automatically set to 2mbps on my server so that I can direct play?
@interconnect said:
First, the container doesn’t matter; the underlying codec does. The ideal situation so that Plex will direct play would be a mkv container with x264/h264 for video and something like DD or DTS for audio. MKV is the most flexible and preferred container at this time.
I disagree about MKV - for ME mp4 are more consistent than MKV.
@Rockapella said:
So when I set the movie as 2mbps/720p, it works fine. Its only when its set to original that it has this issue. How do I find out what the mbps is for “original”? Also when I change the quality to 2mbps/720p it begins transcoding, which I assume is because it needs to change the quality to something lower. Is there a way I can make sure the movies I have are automatically set to 2mbps on my server so that I can direct play?
That tells me that @kegobeer-plex is homing in on the issue. You can’t fit 10 tons of cabbage on a 2 ton truck.
I have violent allergic reactions to MKV files, but I also don’t need DTS 80 channel audio. I came equipped with the standard number of earholes (2) so me and my MP4 files are quite happy with Stereo AAC 2.0.
In order to see that magnum bit rate for that bluray you ripped with MakeMKV investigate the media info here:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201998867-Investigate-Media-Information-and-Formats
Post the XML info by scrolling down the page about halfway to the paragraph with the big XML letters and follow the instructions for gathering that info and then paste it into a message to freak many out with a wall of text - or change it to a .txt file and attach it - or paste it into a message, highlight it and from under the ‘backwards’ P thingy in the message tools select the ‘Spoiler’ option. If you can do that you’ll be well on your way to learning techie stuff like:
Making two versions of your files - one for local at that magnum bit rate and another more ‘friendly’ version for remote use.
There’s always the option of doing what you’re doing now - lowering the bit rate and letting Plex transcode a more friendly version for remote use. You can also pump up the quality a bit to see where it starts failing by selecting 1080p with a little more bit rate. If that works take a look at the quality. If you can’t see much difference that’s probably because there isn’t much difference and you’re maintaining HUGE files at MAGNUM bit rates when you don’t really have to.
Food for thought.
