I’ve been using the Plex Web App through Safari (macOS Monterey on an M1 MBA) for a while now playing video media from my local PMS, and sometimes remotely when I’m away for work, all without any issues whatsoever.
I just discovered that there is a native Mac App so I downloaded and installed it and it stutters so much that it’s unwatchable. Nothing has changed aside from which “app” I’m using to play the same video. Am I missing something?
check if hardware decoding is enabled in the Plex for Mac
Settings > Player > Show Advanced > Use Hardware Decoding
Thank you for the suggestion. It “is” enabled already. 
If the Plex for Mac client somehow can’t establish a connection to your server securely on the LAN, I think it can fall back to using a Plex.tv “relay” to reach your server, effectively appearing as a WAN connection and causing headaches like transcoding or bandwidth limits. It’s not my area of specialty, but you could check your Plex Dash to see if any of that is happening.
Do you want to grab some mediainfo from the file that won’t play well?
Does it happen to all vidoes or some subset?
How about describing your network, remote access, VPNs, dockers etc?
Describe your PMS version and location too, thanks.
Yes I had a thought that this was happening so I checked the dashboard and it says that the file (I tried more than one of course, but they all buffer like crazy) and it says that it is playing local @ 2Mpbs, the video file is 1080p (HVEC Main 10) Direct Play.
Again, I tried playing both in the Mac app and through Safari, they both show up in dashboard with the same info I listed above. Plex Web in Safari plays flawlessly, no buffering at all, while the Mac app buffers every few seconds.
My PMS is hosted on a Shield TV 2017 hooked onto my local network while all of my media is on a NAS, also on my local network. Location is Canada.
mediainfo is an application. Would need to see it’s output for the file that won’t play, and logs from Plex for Mac and PMS showing a reboot then playing one problem video for 30sec, then grabbing logs. The details on how to do that are in the Plex website articles.
In the absence of those, try to read up any Articles that cover quality, playback, buffering, PMS and Player settings.
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