Hi everyone I'm fairly new to the Plex party and have been using a WDTV Hub for many years quite happily. I have jumped over to Plex purely because it allows me to have more storage and takes a little less work to maintain.
Anyway I have been testing Plex for the last two weeks against XBMC and the original WDTV to ensure I get the same quality across all of them first and foremost. I have in this time pretty much decided on Plex largely because it has a better interface both on PC and the Xbox one.
Anyway getting to the point I have a wide variety of movie files from average sized mkv movies between 5Gb - 12Gb per file and this is 90% of my catalogue. However, my favourite movies I tend to opt for fuller fat mkv's for the added picture quality. These files range up to 30Gb and in this particular instance an MKV which was 26GB this was a full 1080p movie with a DTS MA soundtrack was ebing played on the Xbox One. The file launched and played for about 2 mins before pausing for 15-20secs before continuing for 3-5mins and pausing again. This process just continued on and on. I thought perhaps that because the file was shared from my WDTV that this might be impacting play so I moved it to the MediaServer Computer's own HDD. The issue was the same here too, so I tried playing the file back from the PC directly (as opposed to through the Xbox One). Here the filed played for slightly longer before pausing but none the less it paused after certain intervals of time.
Eventually I used XBMC Gotham to play the file back on my PC as my guests were a little bored of my trouble shooting by this point. The file loaded and played through XBMC with no trouble at all. Since the original problem I have also tested a large m2ts file which is a similar size at 25.8Gb. This also had the same problem in Plex on the PC and Xbox One, I allowed the file to play for longer and this leads to shorter periods of play before pauses, gradually getting worse as time went on.
Having checked the system resources while the files are playing it's clear that the CPU is being maxed out when the file is played, the RAM is fine but the CPU is topped out. This is interesting though because when the same file is ran in XBMC the CPU hits between 50% and 60% during playing back. Playing standard mkv's @ 6Gb's or so works perfectly. In settings I have local play back set to 20mbps and at the moment I have all audio formats enabled as the amp supports them all. This of course only applies to Plex Theatre on the PC because settings can't be changed on the XBox currently.
The PC Specs are:
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 @2.8GHz
3Gb RAM
Win 7 HP 32 Bit
I have since read on the forums that enabling only LPCM as the supported sound format is a possible way of working around an existing bug. Is this correct? Anyone had any experience with this? i will be testing this out tonight.
I also have a couple of other queries, does anyone know if the Plex App for windows 8.1 (Surface Pro 3) or windows phone not only works as a plex client but also works as a remote either for Xbox One or Plex Theatre. If not are there any apps that can do this?
Also as much as I love Plex I would like to see the items below added:
*Xbox One, The ability to search by an entered title/word, not just the skip to letter function.
*Plex Theatre, the ability to control the application using mouse and better still compatibility with touch devices. I would very much like a remote control app on my surface.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!
:)
