What is Direct Play?

General Discussions Plex Features
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Server Version#: 1.14.0.5470
Player Version#: 1.05

I’ve been sifting through the forums and using the search bar to find information on Direct Play, but all I’m finding are people who have problems with Direct Play. I’m trying to understand how this affects my videos.

I came across some forum posts saying to disable direct play as I had a problem with playing my kids’ TV shows on my PS4. Audio was playing, but no video. I have quite a few movies that I play through the Plex app on my PS4 and never had any issues. So, when I had recently sync’d some TV shows to my Plex server, my kids’ show, to watch it on our big screen I encountered said problem. I ventured to turn off Direct Play and, viola, video was playing with the audio! Oddly, this problem only occurred when trying to play through my PS4, but not when I played the show through our networked Blu-ray player on another TV. What happened? How does this affect my other video/movies?

TL;DR: Why did turning off Direct Play allow my video to play properly? How does this affect my other videos that would normally play with Direct Play on?

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https://support.plex.tv/articles/201566396-how-are-direct-play-direct-stream-and-transcoding-different/

The posts you saw are mainly from user whose server is too weak to perform transcoding.
Transcoding can also affect the picture quality. So user want to avoid it oftentimes.

But if it helps you watching your media on your PS4 and you don’t notice any quality issues and you don’t have stuttering or pausing playback, then all is well.
It just means that Plex server is working as intended.

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