Transcoding drops out of hardware and I also error on Android client

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Server Specs: Windows 11, Intel n150 , 16GB Ram, v1.42.1.10060-4e8b05daf
Client: Samsung S25 Android 15, v2025.24.0

Problem:

I have an HD HomeRun connected to my server. It and the Plex server are on the LAN. I’m trying to play live tv on my Android phone which is on my home wifi. I run into two problems:

  1. I noticed the video streams fine for some short period of time and in the dashboard, I see it as Local with hardware transcoding. After a bit more time, it switches to software transcoding (the hw disappears and my video pauses for a second or two).
  2. The client will eventually stop playing and show “Source Error”

I pulled out a bit of the server logs and included them as well as the client logs.

On the client logs, I see a Playback error.

On the server logs, I see “Failed to stream media, client probably disconnected”

Note on timestamps: My server time seems to have not been in sync and somehow around 3 minutes off from the client. Sorry if that makes debugging too difficult. LMK and I can always generate another set of logs reproducing the issue. I’ve now solved the time sync problem.

Two questions:

  1. Why would the transcoding fallback from hardware to software if nothing else is playing? BTW, I can’t quite make from the logs when it switches from hardware to software transcoding but I see it happening in the dashboard.
    I purchased this new mini pc with an Intel n150 hoping it would be powerful enough. I also verified that it is running the latest graphics driver from Intel. I tried disabling HDR tone mapping but that didn’t seem to change things.
  2. Why does the client keep crashing?

I can’t seem to get enough details out of the debug logs to help me figure out how to make this work. Sometimes the live stream will play for minutes and other times only for 30-90 seconds.

As an aside, this doesn’t appear to be an issue when Direct Streaming on my Roku, or at least not as immediate.

Thank you in advance for reading this. I’d appreciate any help you can offer.

server_snapshot.log (253.8 KB)

plex-log-2025-09-15T04_04_00.142Z.zip (439.3 KB)

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It just happened again so in case it helps, here’s the latest full zip of server and client logs:

Plex Media Server Logs_2025-09-14_21-52-14.zip (2.3 MB)

plex-log-2025-09-15T04_47_58.557Z.zip (380.8 KB)

2

I think (although I probably just cursed myself) that this is now working. Key change was in Windows 11 to set the graphics GPU for Plex and Plex Transcoder to run on high, like a game:

image
image876×720 42.3 KB

I’m not sure if “Optimizations for windowed games” matters as that seems to only apply to DirectX but I am thinking setting GPU preference to High Performance for especially the Plex Transcoder might have done it.