I am trying to watch some 4K TV shows on my macos “plex media player” app. Specifically westworld. It plays fine on my shield TVs, but when I try to playback from my Mac, I get an infinite buffer loop after a minute or five of watching. Seemingly random, but happens consistently and so I thought I’d post here to find out what’s up. It IS direct playing, not transcoding. My server is plenty fast enough and as I said - it works fine on my other plex devices in the house. (Mac is wired too). Before jumping to conclusions about it being 4K and ignoring the post - here are the dashboard activity screenshots to prove my point.
Starting an episode looks like this:
Huge spike of data, then it trickles down to standard 4K VBR rates as it should. On my Shield it does the same exact thing, only it never stops… what you can’t see in this screenshot is that after it “stops” it doesn’t really stop - it continues at exactly 2mbps and since the 4K is so bandwidth heavy it buffers pretty much nonstop. You’ll get a hiccup of video and audio every 10 seconds or so… but the dashboard never hands out more data than 2mbps. Here’s what it looks like if I just leave it buffering…
If I try to playback this show in the web browser, it gets transcoded so it’s not the same thing, but the dashboard shows it like this:
Why am I getting cut back to only 2mbps on my direct streaming of local content? I have no upload limit set, and I even have my remote bandwidth set to original in my client.
If I stop the stream, and start it again, it immediately starts playing (direct play still) and continues to work just fine until it hits another 2mbps chokehold and I have to stop and resume the show again.
