Depends on your system. If it could direct play, it would.
Well then, here’s to hoping 8.0 fixed the stuttering issue, but I highly doubt it.
Is it stuttering?
Haven’t had the chance to test yet. May try tomorrow
@OttoKerner said:
How old is this particular Roku model?
Older ones have a hard limit to 4 Reference Frames. Forcing Direct Play on such a file won’t work.
It says that in the documentation, but my Roku 3 will happily DirectPlay some stuff I have with 10 reference frames. In fact, I’ve never run across any h.264 it won’t DirectPlay. (Yes, I’m sure. Transcoding’s pretty obvious on a 120" screen. I also use NuVue, which shows me on my phone whether anything’s transcoding.)
@AliMusa said:
What do you mean when you say copying files to/from the same disk? I don’t believe this is my issue but I’m not sure what you mean so I can’t say for sure.
Transferring files from a different computer to a disk while streaming video stored on that disk (e.g. video I just finished encoding on my other machine) or buying a new disk and copying stuff to it from the old one while streaming video stored on either one.
I’m using some extremely sloooooow drives, though, so if you’re not doing that, that’s probably not your problem.
@JuiceWSA said:
… and that sounds EXACTLY like the 7.7 Roku Firmware HELL that happens to me if I don’t ‘Force’ Direct Play.
I don’t get the buffering, but files Direct Play for a while then at random - for no reason - start transcoding.
Oh… maybe that’s why I’m not seeing this issue… I set mine to ‘Force’ a looooong time ago because basically the combination of a Roku 3 and an audio-video receiver will Direct Play any h.264 I throw at it (regardless of what it says in Roku’s documentation about reference frames), but if I don’t set it to ‘force’ Plex will randomly decide to transcode, which looks like @#$% on a projector.
EDIT: Oh, hang on… Sorry, I did have it set like that until recently, but there was an issue where it actually needed to transcode audio in some edge cases (like people plugging in headphones to their Roku remote). Now all my and my friends’/family’s Roku 3s and Roku TVs (that’s about 8 of them) are set like this:
- Direct Play: Auto
- Local Quality: Original
- Remote Quality: Original
- Allow Direct Stream: Yes
- Maximum H.264 Level: 5.1
… And that seems to keep the transcoding down to “only when absolutely necessary”. I’m on Roku firmware 7.7.0 locally, not sure about the remote ones. Haven’t seen any stuttering or had any complaints about it, though.
