Unstable 4K playback - identifying the weak link

[Desperateforajob]

Server Version#: 3.108.2
Player Version#: 7.18.0

Hi,

I’ve got a fairly simple setup at home, 2018 Mac mini (i5/8Gb) running PMS (and doing just that), Synology NAS for storage. 2017 Sony Bravia AndroidTV running the Plex Android client.

I’m trying to understand why 4K direct play doesn’t work. The video is purely unwatchable, plenty of frame dropped, horrible audio jitter, you just stop trying after 30 seconds.

As far as I understand, no transcoding is involved, the original file is 2160p:HEVC and the TV is 4K (connecting the Mac to the TV via HDMI works a charm in 4K). Plus, when watching the Dashboard on PMS, it doesn’t indicate any overload. So I’m baffled as to why things don’t work. Is it the TV that’s not powerful enough to decode 4K? Would I have been lured by marketing propaganda when buying the TV? I don’t think it’s the router… everything goes over 1GbE, no wireless involved.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Dashboard screen grabs:

[Desperateforajob]

Alright, it’s a shame I was only suggested this thread after I had started this one, but here goes for anyone interested, it could be simply due to the audio codec of the source file. I’ll try different audio sources later on and see if it fixes the issue.

Side note to TV manufacturers, what’s the point of marketing 4K UHD TVs if none of them support DTS-HD or similar, ugh…