Server Version#:Windows 7 last version
Player Version#:2021 Galaxy phone
Well went to the Doctors office this morning 4 miles away and got to try out PLEX on my Smart Phone to see the Pass in action !
The Wifi at the doctors was ATT and Plex showed everything but when I play a recording or Live TV is stops and starts 
So figured it was the Doctors slow Wifi so for a text I opened up Netflix and it had NO trouble streaming !
My house No one home so the Comast is 600meg download and 24 meg upload. So it should have full bandwidth from my Server which is on 1 gig cable modem and Router is ASUS RT-AX82U also 1 gig.
Settings IPv6 on remote streams per user is set to 4 and know one is yet online to use it. Treat WAN IP is on Enable relay is on. Secured connection preferred not required . GDM enabled. Am I missing something to stream from home ?
Did you think to try speedtest.net?
While you may have a 1 gig speed it’s your upload speed (24 Meg) that your phone is seeing as your PMS upload speed is the download speed for your phone. That said 24 Meg upload should work for a remotely connected cell phone (assuming you’re not trying to stream some 4k video).
You probably need to try this at a number of places to see if the problem persists. I know I can be home and disconnect from my home wifi and just use cellular data and stream to my phone so you could run some tests from the comfort of your own home. Note that we have a lot of 5g around my house and on just my cellular data I got 213 down and 23 up on the phone. That actually beat my desktop connection on my home wifi which got 140 down and 40 up (got a lot of walls between my router and my desktop). My PMS is hardwired and gets around 800 down and like 35 up. I’ve had up to 4 streams going from my PMS at times with no issues.
Is your Windows 7 machine hardwired to your router or through your home wifi? My router sits behind my TV and my Synology and PS4 as well as my TV itself are all hardwired as well… that’s where the router is so why not? See if you can try your PMS wired.
If you just got the Plex pass check your cpu usage. This automatically enables credit detection which can max your cpu out for an extended period. You can turn it off in the server settings if you want or just wait for it to complete
Additionally, there are quality settings on your phone you may need to adjust. This may be capped at 2 mbps which isn’t enough for most content
Also verify that your remote streaming is configured correctly. If it’s not, you can get an indirect connection which is also capping your speed with a transcode to a lower quality
You can check this in the server dashboard as something plays. Use your phone while you’re at home and turn off the Wi-Fi as you watch the dashboard. I saw you were having trouble with your Firestick as well. I don’t know, but it’s possible this is all related somehow due to a networking issue.
Did you just get a new router not too long ago?
Maybe I wasnt clear My Home Server is Windows 7 dedicated only for PLEX and its Hardwired Cat 5e to the router speed. The speed I posted was Speedtest showing what I have. I was at the Doctors when I tried out my phone on their wifi network ATT No trouble with Netflix or Xfinity Live TV app. But Plex was the one not working well on my phone. Oh and the NIC is 1 gig also on the PC
Same equipment for 2 years. PC i7-4790K 4ghz 8 cores 16g mem
Alright just tried at home by turning off the wifi on the Phone and used Cell Data which will cost me after 1 gig. Played perfect and checked the server on 2 different movies 1080 was avg 5.5 upload speed and 4K was spiked at 8 meg leveled off around 6 meg. CPU usage was 93% and mem was avg 50%. So cell data worked but another location with Wifi does not. Lets not forget Netflix and Xfinity had no issues streaming wifi at that location.
Hmmm… 1 gig max on the phone before they start charging?!? I have unlimited data from Visible and it cost me a whopping $25/month.
Anyway, (Windows knowledge is hazy here as I haven’t run Windows at home for over a decade now) but you could set up Performance Monitor (is that was it’s called) to capture your system’s performance while you stream from some random wifi out and about then come home and view if your system is too taxed. I don’t believe that’s the problem.
It doesn’t matter if you have a 1 gig NIC card, the best you can do outside your house is the 24 Meg you quoted for your upload speed (assuming your speedtest was done at home). Your upload speed from your PMS is your download speed to your phone when you are out using some wifi (or cell connection) outside your home.
And while Netflix and Xfinity work I doubt their upload speeds are 24 Meg. That said it should work (infamous “works for me!”).
You say the speed you posed was Speedtest showing what you have. To be clear, was that speedtest done from your home (my assumption)? Great. But did you run a speedtest at your doctor’s office on his wifi using your phone? Cause my experience is that doctor’s offices and other small businesses don’t know crap about the internet and their wifi and often you’ll get really bad speeds from it. Hotels are another place where you’d be surprised how slow they can become.
I don’t Plex stream to my phone often, never understood why I’d want to watch a video on a tiny screen when I have a 65" TV. The only times are when I’m at a doctor’s office and usually the wifi is subpar.
Your server
Netflix server
Other streaming services don’t work the same way Plex does. They can afford to send out multiple versions of the same content that’s already been converted to a size and format that fits your device
If you stream a 4k video with Plex to your phone, your server has to convert that to a lower quality and bandwidth on the fly in real time. In your case, on a 4th gen CPU with no dedicated GPU. You don’t have to go much over 93% CPU to start having some very noticeable problems
If you happened to be running credit detection at the same time there’s a 0% chance that would work
Have you set up a static ip and port forwarded your server in the router?
Are you sure you’re not getting an indirect connection?
You can look here as you play something with your phone again
You can also untick the box for enable relay in your sever settings and try it. If your remote access isn’t configured properly playback will fail
[quote=“adefaria, post:6, topic:840180”]
I don’t Plex stream to my phone often, never understood why I’d want to watch a video on a tiny screen when I have a 65" TV. The only times are when I’m at a doctor’s office and usually the wifi is subpar.
[/quote] I tried but the Nuse wouldnt let me drag in my Samsung 75" to wait. I figured the phone would be no different then my 10" Tablet when I travel. But the Tablet has no Cell on Wifi. So the PLEX server worried me, when I start to travel.
You are apparently attempting to stream a 4k video that is being transcoded on the fly to SD. Hell, I can’t stream 4k videos except on my TV from my PMS both of which are hardwired directly into my router. The fact that you are transcoding down to SD from 4k pretty much says that PMS doesn’t think you can get HD 1080p or 720p so it’s dropped down to SD given your connection at the docs office which I still haven’t heard if you speedtest’ed that connection, however, I really doubt you’re gonna get anything but stutter in that situation.
As has been pointed out the big boys have massive hardware and big pipes - you don’t. They also probably already have a 1080p and 720p version of the video already transcoded so they don’t need to do it on the fly.
I believe this is where Plex’s Optimize comes into play allowing you to also have different resolution videos already transcoded and at the ready. The trade-off is the typical space vs process time in that those additional resolutions take up space. I’m not sure because I never use it. I tell my friends to use real TV/computers and not to expect good service from a doctor’s offices wifi. That’s why I made sure my Synology, although I’ve been told it doesn’t have that much power CPU-wise, supports hardware GPU transcoding. Like I said I’ve had up to 4 simultaneous streams going and only taxed the Synology CPU about 40% (and the Synology does a number of other tasks for me at the same time).
So I think you have your answer here which would be to make sure the remote wifi you’re using has the bandwidth, don’t attempt to stream 4k videos (or use optimized - in fact, you may want to try that out to see if it solves the problem) and/or get a more powerful server to run Plex on.
In general, the videos I download I set for 720p - 1080p at most.
NO I did not attempt to stream 4K on my Phone from another location outside of my home. 720 and 1080 did not work outside of my home on another wifi system.
Last night I did it at my home by disabling the Wifi on my phone and using Cell data instead to see how my Home Plex server would work and it did 1080 or 4K pretty sure PLEX changed it so it would play perfect and it did.
I tried the Optimize …Thank GOD I stopped IT ! It was duplicating my Movie Video File to another in the same folder. I have well over 7000 movies THAT would of trashed my Drive space !
Hmmm… The image you posted said “Video 4k (H.264) → SD (H.265) Transcode”. Doesn’t that mean your poor server is transcoding a video from 4k → SD?
Exactly. That’s the space vs process time tradeoff. I believe you can optimize individual videos as well as parts of libraries, etc. IOW you don’t need to optimize your whole library. Again, I, like you, don’t use it. Then again, I’m not having problems streaming remotely either.
The image was my PMS when I was streaming through to my Cell over Data not wifi. At my desk
Was planning on it thought PLEX would transcode any of my movies Automatically so it could stream. PLEX is loose on telling you when you click a setting to do the Library if was going to make new videos. Wish when you hover your mouse on a setting it would give you the poop.
The problem, as stated by you, was that you get studders and pauses when out and about on your doc’s wifi. Why then would you consider a pic of your server transcoding a 4k video to SD at your house on cellular to be useful? After all, we don’t know if you were attempting to stream the same 4k → SD video, thus taxing your server at home (I believe you said 93% busy) as well as what speed you were really getting from your doctor’s office’s wifi. It’s hard to help remotely when the data requested is spotty at best.
I asked you if you perchance used speedtest to measure things. I meant did you use speedtest at your doc’s office when you were on their wifi and having the problem? After all, that’s where the problem was occurring. You said, “The speed I posted was Speedtest showing what I have”. It’s unclear from this statement where you ran that speedtest. I asked specifically if you ran a speed test at the point you were having a problem at the doc’s office. You decided not to address that question.
Yes, Plex does transcode movies automatically - on the fly as they say - but doing so requires effort and horsepower and can, guess what, result in studders and pauses - ergo your problem! Optimize uses space to try to alleviate some of the horsepower needed by pre-transcoding things. And when I find the configuration options do not really explain things I then go and search the documentation. A simple google search of “what is optimize in plex” yields https://support.plex.tv/articles/214079318-media-optimizer-overview/. I wouldn’t expect that explanation to fit under the mouse hover.
You said, “Maybe I wasn’t clear my Home Server is Windows 7”. No, it wasn’t that you weren’t clear - you didn’t state it!
Windows 7 is at the TOP which server I am using.
MCEbuddy is another program I use for Media Screening and every option you hover the cursor over has a window popup showing what it will do. Plex has a ton of settings with limited descriptions of what it does when making changes on the fly.
I suggested a Wizard for setting up such a program.
I just noted at the Doctors office PLEX didn’t work but Netflix did over wifi. Next time I go back I will see if Cell data is better. And no while waiting in the lobby wasn’t time to check speeds and other settings. It was only a quick test to see what will happen. So when I travel with my tablet all over the country what I am in for ?
Oh and my Samsung Cell is using Xfinity Cell service which is Wifi calling first and falls back to Verizon towers. $ 15.00 a month. 1 gig is plenty for my Waze App. Not surfing the web while driving but utilize all free hot spots when parked or Hotel, Restaurants etc etc
Your other option is to use the downloads feature. I always keep a random assortment of videos downloaded in case of emergency.
I don’t get a lot of power outages but when I do it’s always for a long time.
Downloading basically does any transcoding ahead of time so you don’t experience any playback issues and it’s always available regardless of your internet or cell situation
I still wouldn’t recommend trying to transcode 4k down to 320p no matter what the situation unless your oven is out of order and you need to bake a chicken on top of your computer
If you keep the Plex pass you may want to look into getting a cheap video card like a 1050ti or something similar. (60-ish bucks) If any transcoding does take place, it reduces the load on your CPU dramatically
I know you want to stay on Windows 7 but even Windows 10 will be EOL soon. A hardware upgrade is inevitable at some point and the video card is transferable to a new system. Having it may also afford you the option to buy a slightly cheaper CPU looking forward
I know none of this is a solution but it’s an option. You should still look into why you were having trouble, but that will take more testing
LOL No Being New using PLEX PASS I already have Kodi on my devices with ton of media on SD cards. The 4K thing was just a test at home to see if my hardware could handle it. And it did with flying colors. But 4k is for my Home Theater with Samsung 75" using the PLEX app built in. But even PLEX is still a toss up when streaming 4K at home on my network. PLEX did update the FireTV 4K wifi6 app yesterday. Didn’t fix a thing Went to a movies " Weird Science" 720p and it still barfed it out and says check connection. On the same TV plug in old Firestick and it plays the same movie just fine ! So its definitely Amazon hardware or Plex app causing the issues.
But the motherboard built in video works Windows 7 WMC with Digital Cable Aviser to unscramble Cable TV premium channels.
What do you guys like for Video Cards that are PLEX friendly ? Taking more load off the CPU
