Stream 1 has running for 3 hours (on a 100 minute .m2ts) and is only 8% through. Seems to be completely stalled.
Stream 2 goes for a minute or two, then buffers for at least 2x the time it played.
Stream 3 is a direct play (mpeg2video/1920x1080 direct play dec-ma 6 ch) to my Oppo 105D. Perfect, not a single glitch. Playing through the Plex Player App on the Mac (direct player also) works just fine.
I turned off hardware transcoding and that did make a difference. Stream will play for a minute or so, then buffer for several more minutes before playing again.
There are a lot of subtitles in these files, 5-7. Assuming (from other posts) that subtitles are the problem, I’ve tried all of the the “Burn Subtitles” settings but they don’t seem to make a difference. Can’t find any setting to turn subtitles completely off.
So the PR4100 is useless playing a Blu-Ray if transcoding is required. Just wondering if I am missing something.
@dmoor said:
So the PR4100 is useless playing a Blu-Ray if transcoding is required. Just wondering if I am missing something.
Nope. Not missing a thing.
NAS devices have pages all all over the Plex support Wiki stating most aren’t powerful enough to transcode.
After several pages, I ended up on the NAS Compatibility List, which specifically has your NAS listed, and that it’s not powerful enough to transcode single stream high bitrate 720 and 1080p content.
EDIT - Sorry. Looked at wrong row/DL4100, not the PR4100.
Chart says a SINGLE client should work with hardware accelerated transcoding enabled.
Three streams - good luck.
Though danjames92 may be correct, I can’t attest to that, I will say this - Most NAS performance for any CPU, whether it does hardware acceleration or not, is challenging at best for higher HD bitrate streams. They use less energy for mass storage for a reason - low powered CPUs. The Plex wiki has several pages describing NAS challenges for just that reason. I tried running a server on my QNAP TS-653 Pro. It has a Intel® Celeron® J1900 (quad 2ghz). My friends and I quickly grew frustrated after more than one stream started, and I even encode my bluray at reasonably low (5-8k) bitrate MP4.
Though I love my raid box for many reasons - live transcode streaming is not one of them.
I understand the potential frustration - we want full quality with less space/power consumption.
NAS devices usually aren’t capable.
@JamminR said:
Most NAS performance for any CPU, whether it does hardware acceleration or not, is challenging at best for higher HD bitrate streams. They use less energy for mass storage for a reason - low powered CPUs.
My data doesn’t support this statement, at least for the WD PR4100. For the Blu-ray titles that keep buffering when streaming Plex.Py shows the cpu status as “throttled” which I understand to mean that there’s plenty of cpu.
Right now I have 5 streams going, 4 of them 1080p, and cpu is just 60%. But I’m also doing a 700 GB copy to the PR4100 and plex is refreshing it’s libraries. Very impressive.
There are no subtitles, however, in the 1080p streams.
So I don’t understand the buffering issue when there are subtitles on Blu-Rays, as there seems to be plenty of CPU available. Is this just a software issue?
I have a bit more information. Installing the developer HUD on my Apple TV I can see that my bandwidth is 70-100 Mbps and my bitrate peak is 20.76 Mbps when streaming a blu-Ray mkv. CPU is 36% and memory is 14% on the pr4100. So there is plenty of headroom but I still get get messages that my cpu isn’t powerful enough and that my network is too slow. Very annoying that all the attention is going to new features when basic core functions aren’t working. Apple learned the hard way - just do the things that you can do well. Get the core stuff working,then worry about news feeds.
Are you still using an unsupported file container? If so, that’s the causes of all of your issues.
I run PMS on a NAS. Mine is an Asustor AS-7004T with an i3-4330 CPU in it. Prior to getting this box I was running PMS on an AS-202T NAS. That CPU had a whopping 200 passmarks. The only way I could watch anything on it was to convert the media to MP4. (You were advised earlier to use MKV, which I found problematic at best, and impossible to watch at worst.)
If you want to watch your media, it’s time to consider changing your media containers. MP4, H264 with an AAC Stereo audio track as the first track works on 100% of Plex’s client apps. (Assuming bitrates < 20Mbps.) You can use DTS or AC3 5.1 as a second audio track for most client apps. (Not mobile devices.)
Anything else is wasting time, IMO. There are a host of excellent tools for converting your media. Look at my signature for a link to @cayars great conversion scripts for a solution that works on most Linux based NASes automatically.
