What can I do about this?
My media server is on my Dell XPS 13 laptop. I notice that when I play these files the CPU spikes to 100%. My options for watching Plex are PS4, xbox 1, Samsung app and Chromecast. If I change the video quality to 720P that stops the buffering.
What should I do? Do I need to run my media server on more powerful hardware or is there something else I can do?
Transcoding H265 requires a lot of CPU power. Lowering the quality just reduces the CPU load slightly. You can check your server log when it is transcoding for the words “speed=” The number after that will say how fast it is going with 1.0 being real-time. Anything near that or below will most likely result in buffering.
OK - what would you recommend I do to fix this? I have plenty money to play with and I’m very into movies and shows so I don’t want to have any buffering.
From what I can see my options would be to either get a high powered PC with plenty storage or a dedicated server?
I would invest in a dedicated powerful player, running OpenHT or Plex Media Player able to manage H265. At the moment PMP shoul direct play in platform supporting H265, like intel Skylake CPU’s (6th gen). I have an i3 5th gen NUC (suppports a mixed SW/HW H265 decoding), and I have no problem to direct play H265 content.
And even if you have the money to splurge on a server capable of transcoding x265 to clients not capable of playing it natively - it might not be the best choice. The live transcoding Plex does isn’t aimed at quality nor is it perfect in how it handles x265 (yet) - which will degrade the experience on these clients. I’d have two versions of the media, one for the high end client that @Wolf_666 advised for (x265 where you’d go bananas on bitrate, HDR, 4k etc) and one low-bitrate x264 for the rest of your clients. Expanding on storage and pretranscode your files is a much better solution imho.
Expanding on storage and pretranscode your files is a much better solution imho.
I agree. To me, the only reason for h265 is space and hence bandwidth. However, if the clients can’t handle h265 then they will get transcoded to a larger h264 file so the bandwidth savings go away. So to me, the most cost effective method for dealing with h265 is to not use it and just stick to h264. Spend the money on storage which is much cheaper than any other solution.
Sometimes choosing h264 isn’t an option though.
@Wolf_666 said:
I would invest in a dedicated powerful player, running OpenHT or Plex Media Player able to manage H265. At the moment PMP shoul direct play in platform supporting H265, like intel Skylake CPU’s (6th gen). I have an i3 5th gen NUC (suppports a mixed SW/HW H265 decoding), and I have no problem to direct play H265 content.
What sort of money would I be looking at? Can you recommend specific models? My reservation about spending all this on a dedicated player is that is all it will do. If I was to invest in a high powered PC at least that would give me other benefits.
@jackbauer87 said:
Sometimes choosing h264 isn’t an option though.
h.264 is always an option when ripping your media from disc, never seen a modern ripper app that didn’t have it.
Regards
Another option is to have the Plex server create optimized version of x265 content.
I have a few TV series that are x265 and of course had the same buffering issues playing them on my PMP box. I have reconfigured Plex server to optimize these TV shows and keep the same quality but transcode to x264,
The benefit as far as i am concerned is that some time i the future x265 content will become the norm and when that happens I can just drop the optimized versions.
@NedtheNerd said:
@jackbauer87 said:
Sometimes choosing h264 isn’t an option though.h.264 is always an option when ripping your media from disc, never seen a modern ripper app that didn’t have it.
Regards
I don’t do that though.
You basically have 3 options
