Hi all, I’m using a Windows 11 machine as my plex server. There is no monitor plugged into it. This PMS is on my network along with my Nvidia Shield Pro which i’m using as my Plex Player. sometimes when I’m watching movies, the video stutters a bit, but not the audio. I can’t figure out why this is happening. my network is 1gbps and there is not much happening on the network when i’m watching a movie. I’m thinking this is cause because I’m using the onboard video of my Windows 11 machine. If i were to buy a better video card and plug it into the PMS, would plex use this video card and do you think it could stop the video stuttering?
Without a Plex Pass, you are using no GPU at all. Hardware video transcoding is a Plex Pass feature.
Verify that the Plex Dashboard in the web app says during playback, that the video stream is being transcoded. If it says “Direct Stream” or “Direct Play” instead, switching to hardware transcoding won’t change anything.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200871837-status-and-dashboard/
last time I checked, it did say Direct Play. but I’ll check again. I don’t play files on my phone or tablet, i always play the files on my 4k tv.
I just confirmed. it says Direct Play for both video and audio. so what do you think could be causing the video only to studder sometimes? my PMS is on a Windows 11 machine that’s doubling as a torrent seed box as well. but there is never anything downloading when I’m watching a movie and my upload speed is very low so i’m lucky if i’m uploading at 3mb per second. and that’s rare. but it can’t be network speed causing this problem because if it was, both the video and audio would studder. it must have something to do with video processing. my cpu is an i5-14500 and it has 32gb of memory. could it be that plex server doesn’t work well on windows 11?
If your file is direct playing there is no “video processing” going on. People who use clients that can direct play their media can run Plex on a Raspberry Pi successfully.
What are your playback clients, and are they using a new enshittified version of the Plex app perhaps? 
my clients are both plex media player that’s on the nvidia shield pro. are you saying the latest version is not good? I can check what version I have and let you know.
It’s fine. If it’s a Shield it’s the previous (legacy) app so that’s not the issue.
Have you run a speed test from the Shield yet?
no I haven’t. is there a speedtest app I can install?
If you install the Downloader app from the Play Store you can visit a regular speed test website in its browser.
I have my ISPs speed test site, fast com, a locally hosted speed test server, and a couple other useful destinations bookmarked in mine.
the internet is not the problem. the movies i’m watching are stored on my network. when we watch netflix, its always fine. this only happens sometimes when we watch movies using Plex.
plus its not a network speed issue. if it was, both the audio and video would stutter at the same time. only the video is studdering.
I doubt you have a local speed tests server in your home, so we’re just using an Internet speed test as a way of measuring what the Shield can pull over the network. if it can get 100 Mbps on an internet test then we know it can get at least that much from your server in the house.
Netflix bitrate is trash, btw. Like 5 Mbps is fairly standard for their 1080p stream. And 4K is going to be 25 Mbps most likely. So unless you’re stocking NF rips the performance will not be comparable.
Edit: If you want to run a local speed test I recommend OpenSpeedTest. And it looks like they are on the Microsoft Store, so you could run it on the same PC as your Plex Server. You would still need a web browser on the Shield to run the test, so Downloader is still a good option, as I know it allow browsing local IPs. I’ve tried some other smart TV web browsers in the past that wouldn’t browse to local IP addresses on the network for some reason.
what are NF rips?
Downloads of Netflix video.
The Android Plex app can direct play almost everything.
Well, the legacy app can. Not this brand new beta that just came out. 
Do you have the mediainfo for something you have trouble playing?
99% of my movies either full full resolution remux mkv files or i downloaded the disc and used makemkv to convert it to an mkv file. what info exactly do you want from the movie file?
Mostly I was looking for reasons it might not play well. If it’s a remux of a Blu-ray then it’s 1080p h.264 at up to 40 Mbps (eight times that of Netflix) and potentially HD audio formats. So another 4.5 Mbps for 5.1 or 6M for 7.1. This should be very doable in the performance limits of a Shield.
If it’s a UHD disc you’re looking at video bit rates that can spike over 120 Mbps just for video, and it would be in HEVC instead.
the last movie that did that was Jurasic World Rebirth. I downloaded the 4k disc which was chopped up. I used winrar to piece it back together into the .iso file. then I used makemkv and convert it to an mkv file.
Media
- Duration 2:13:40
- Bitrate 73638 kbps
- Width 3840
- Height 2160
- Aspect Ratio 1.78
- Video Resolution 4K
- Container MKV
- Video Frame Rate 24p
- Video Profile main 10
Part
-
Duration 2:13:40
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File Jurassic World Rebirth.mkv
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Size 68.77 GB
-
Container MKV
-
Video Profile main 10
-
Codec HEVC
-
Bitrate 69620 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
D O V I B L Compat I D 6
-
D O V I B L Present true
-
D O V I E L Present true
-
D O V I Level 6
-
D O V I Present true
-
D O V I Profile 7
-
D O V I R P U Present true
-
D O V I Version 1.0
-
Bit Depth 10
-
Chroma Location topleft
-
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
-
Coded Height 2160
-
Coded Width 3840
-
Color Primaries bt2020
-
Color Range tv
-
Color Space bt2020nc
-
Color Trc smpte2084
-
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
-
Height 2160
-
Level 5.1
-
Profile main 10
-
Ref Frames 1
-
Width 3840
-
Display Title 4K DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)
-
Extended Display Title 4K DoVi/HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)
-
Codec TRUEHD
-
Channels 8
-
Bitrate 3145 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
Audio Channel Layout 7.1
-
Bit Depth 24
-
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
-
Title Surround 7.1
-
Display Title English (TRUEHD 7.1)
-
Extended Display Title Surround 7.1 (English TRUEHD)
-
Codec AC3
-
Channels 6
-
Bitrate 448 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
Audio Channel Layout 5.1(side)
-
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
-
Title Surround 5.1
-
Display Title English (AC3 5.1)
-
Extended Display Title Surround 5.1 (English AC3)
-
Codec AC3
-
Channels 2
-
Bitrate 192 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
Audio Channel Layout stereo
-
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
-
Title Stereo
-
Display Title English (AC3 Stereo)
-
Extended Display Title Stereo (English AC3)
-
Codec AC3
-
Channels 2
-
Bitrate 192 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
Audio Channel Layout stereo
-
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
-
Title Stereo
-
Display Title English (AC3 Stereo)
-
Extended Display Title Stereo (English AC3)
-
Codec PGS
-
Bitrate 41 kbps
-
Language English
-
Language Tag en
-
Display Title English (PGS)
-
Extended Display Title English (PGS)
The bitrate listed is an average (69.6 Mbps). During high-action scenes it will be spiking higher.
Some people feel even a Shield cannot reliably handle the video bandwidth from a 4K disc, these people maintain their Shields at the older (original) software version because it was lighter weight than the current version, or they “debloat” the system software. Also, if you’re watching discs that use “seamless branching” to include multiple cuts of a film you will have issues with audio sync throughout the playback.
I think the current Shield software version is fine. I’ve been watching the occasional 4K remux lately, but I have a couple times had an issue where things would hang or otherwise not play right. This was a movie-by-movie thing so I can’t really name the cause.
- Sinners would hang with a spinner or start to play choppy if I tried to skip forward or backward in the playback, but was fine if I started it and then just let it play.
- Minority Report stopped twice on me with an endless buffering spinner in the first 20 minutes when I played it on the Plex app, but I changed to Plezy and it played fine for the remaining two hours of the movie.
If you can reproduce the issue reliably with a specific disc, you’re gonna want to play it and then go retrieve the player logs from the Plex app to give here for someone from Plex to look at the issue.
