no luck after disabling the anti-virus. Logs attached.
Sounds like a hardware issue to meā¦ possibly overheating?, bad cable, bad USB port, enclosure or drive?
Rethinkingā¦ probably not the drive plenty of transcodeand read speed, but overheating is possible so is a cable intermittently losing connection.
Iāll look to find a second drive to compare against
well, maybe I guess I was wrong, thereās a lot of buffering problems from the internal drive too. I tried watching a Modern Family episode last night and the buffering was terrible, every couple seconds until we gave up trying to watch. Logs attached
Latest log shows playback of an mkv with hevc encoding. This could be introducing another issue. Transcoding speeds are falling below 1.0 at times.
Analyzing the file:
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: analyzing media item 5456
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: E20 - All Things Being Equal: Direct Play is disabled
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: E20 - All Things Being Equal: media must be transcoded in order to use the hls protocol
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: E20 - All Things Being Equal: no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: E20 - All Things Being Equal: no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc/aac
May 05, 2017 21:17:34.807 [5452] DEBUG - MDE: E20 - All Things Being Equal: no remuxable profile found, so video stream will be transcoded
Speed shown to be below realtime:
May 05, 2017 21:33:15.755 [0644] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:63919 (Loopback)] PUT /video/:/transcode/session/16668fecf35b309f0be653713cb99f95/progress?progress=69.6&size=-22&speed=0.9&remaining=332 (12 live) Signed-in Token (sackhouse)
Playback of hevc files are going to use all of your cpu. I donāt have any in my library. I donāt have transcoding issues as I encode all my media to a format that will direct play on any of my clients before placing in my Plex library. (mp4, h264, high profile level 4.1, aac audio, web optimized).
Things you could try - this for both issues.
Optimize your media.
Disable secure connections on the server and allow fallback to insecure connections on the client.
Check power settings on the server to make sure everything is off.
Hot Tip:
HEVC on Plex is a Wild Animal not yet Domesticated.
Give it a few more years and they may be able to tame it.
At this time itās like getting aboard that young, angry, two-ton bull and hoping the Rodeo Clown is having a good day.
In order to use h.265/HEVC you either need a client with hardware decoding support or a server running plex with plenty of CPU muscle to transcode it on the fly.
This isnāt anything particular to Plex itself.
any suggestions on a tool that lets me optimize my whole library? Some sort of bulk conversion thing or do I need to go through and manually inspect each file?
also, not 100% sure on whatās meant by check power settings on the server to ensure everything is off. Does that mean literally unplug the box, quit the server on my desktop, and restart everything?
@sackhouse said:
also, not 100% sure on whatās meant by check power settings on the server to ensure everything is off. Does that mean literally unplug the box, quit the server on my desktop, and restart everything?
No, it means to check the power settings on the server and make sure itās not set up to power down the ethernet port, spin down the drives, go to sleep, etc.
ah, got it. No issues there
@sackhouse said:
Yes, the buffer only occurs when reading off the external drive, not the internal drive. Iāll try the anti-virus thing and report back on how that goes
Have you run a health test of that External drive, sounds like it on the way out
Although I donāt use it, Plex does have a built in function to create optimized versions
Creating Optimized Versions.
Cayersā MP4 Auto Convert Scripts (remux and transcode) is something I use quite often and as a Plex Pass member you do have access to the Plex pass forum Cayars posted it in.
Quick fyi on other tools I use to help create and maintain my library.
I use MCEBuddy to remove commercials and convert recorded TV.
Avidemux to remove the commercials MCEBuddy missed and to sync audio when necessary - as well as other things.
XMedia Recode for volume normalization andā¦
MakeMKV and HandBrake for new rips and recodes.
MKVToolNix for merging multi-part movies and dealing with mkvs.
And no mater the source, nothing goes into my library without going through FileBot. It automatically creates the filenames and folder structure necessary to match Plex naming guidelines.
I was referring to Windows Power Management features.
Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options
so I think (finger crossed) I found the root cause. In the server settings for Plex Could, verbose logging was selected. No idea why, I must have clicked it at some point. Since unclicking it, all the buffering issues have gone away, both from the external hard drive and the laptopās drive. No idea why it affected the external drive media so much more. Assuming the problem is solved, I wanted to thank everyone who chimed it, itās helped me learn a lot about a program and technology Iāve taken advantage of up to this point. Hopefully, if you hear of something suffering a similar fate as me, youāll remember this use case and ask them to check their Plex Cloud server settings too!
