Was watching one of my movies on Plex last night and for the first time since installing Plex the movie would start buffering. At the same time that I was watching a movie upstairs on my ROKU connected to WiFi, my daughter and a friend were watching a movie on the ROKU connected via ethernet downstairs. Additionally, i had one friend that was watching a video remotely. No one was having buffering problems except for me. In the attached screenshot…I was watching Pacific Rim.
I noticed that my daughter was direct playing both the video and the audio for the BluRay I Am Legend. I however was transcoding both the video and the audio. I don’t know why since both of these were being streamed locally. I understand that the remote user likely had to transcode at a lower quality to avoid buffering but why me. And why is the Mbps so much higher for Pacific Rim than for I Am Legend?
I did do some reading and realized that I might have messed up on how I encoded my MP4 files. For instance, in the I Am Legend MP4 file, I obviously did the AC3 passthru for the audio. However, I noticed after a while some of my MKV files had DTS-HD and so I selected DTS-HD Passthru in Handbrake thinking that whatever that was would just be available for me to play on the other end. I don’t really understand what AC3 means and whether I can enable the 7.1 surround experience by encoding with Handbrake. Is Plex only able to Direct Play AC3? Will and AC3 encoding preserve the 7.1 sound. I realize that part of that question is maybe for Handbrake but I am hoping someone has some answers. I am bummed because it has taken my a week to encode my remaining BluRay disks and I might have to redo that effort. Here is my Handbrake audio settings just in case it helps.
