As you can see on screenshoot local client is using ~20mbit to playback and remote clinet is using around 5mbit and transcodoing process is running on plex server.
Is it possile find out what video/audio was playbacked to remote client after transcoding ie to find out what was the final quality?
During the playback on remote client - sometimes it got stuck for 1-2sec and playback then continue… is that a network issue or is it possible the CPU on server is fully utilized and transcoding is not able to run without pausing…?
Looks about right.
Your upload speed is at 10 Mbit/s and Plex will keep some buffer in order not to eat up your entire bandwidth – so if it goes for 8 Mbit/s bitrate, that’s the best you will get through your connection.
If you scroll further down in the dashboard during playback you should see how busy the CPU gets. In the end it’s hard to tell… could be your CPU, some peak in the maximum video bandwidth or some parallel network activity interfering.
Check out what CPU you have in your system and see if it supports HW accelerated streaming…
That should give you 1 transcode @ 1080p or 2 transcoding sessions @ 720p. HW transcoding could work considering the CPU supports Intel’s Quick Sync Video… however it’s HW transcoding capabilities seem limited (see for Plex NAS Compatibility Guide for QNAP TVS-682-PT-8G)
check out your own screenshot… 3rd line has the info.
its my own NAS so there is motherboard supermicro X11SSM-F i think i can replace cpu if that help … but no clue what exactly is it - that “pausing” for 1/2 sec if its life or transcoding stuff.
The i in 1080i refers to how the picture is built up. It’s made for an interlaced scan, while p refers to progressive scans. Basically it means that the picture is split in 2 half-pictures where each half-picture is is replaced by a double the (perceived) frame rate.
That has probably nothing to do with your transcoding… your transcoding is because the video has a higher bitrate than supported by your internet upload speed.
As for the audio… both, AAC and AC3 are compressed formats – however AAC can usually achieve a better compression while maintaining a good quality. Most players support AC3 as well as AAC. So unless your client has an aversion against AC3, it’s probably part of the same “saving bandwidth to squeeze the stream through your limited upload bandwidth” schema.
See above and keep an eye on that dashboard while playing your video remotely. If the hiccup is due to your CPU this should show on the now playing tiles. (probably also in the CPU graph)
That should give you your first clue to that mystery
so may thanks for such an explanation and next steps.
may i have one more question… what exactly doest that mean that video is transcoded from hgher to lower bitrate? does it mean also quality of the picture is impacted? thx!
There’s many factors when it comes to video quality.
But yes… usually decreasing the bitrate means it’s lowering the quality.
The bitrate describes how many bytes the video file is using per second – the more bytes you use, the more data you can use to provide audio and picture information. That being said… you might not necessarily notice a good transcode to a lower bitrate for some formats. Example: DVDs are stored in a very poor format (well… it’s old) – you can store the same image in a much smaller file using a recent encoder… so you might not notice a degradation of the video quality. If your video is already in a modern format (e.g. h264 1080p content or h265 4K content) you will probably notice it.
