Server Version#: Most recent
Player Version#: Most recent
Sometime in the last week, my macOS PLEX media server has gone into the toilet.
Every movie I play now is force-transcoded. Worse, EVERY movie I play stutters, buffers, pixellates, stalls &/or crashes. On my local network, I’m connected via ethernet to my PLEX server. And there is plenty of bandwidth to go around.
Since when did PLEX have a problem with AAC audio? Never before on my server. I always used Direct Play w/Direct stream enabled. Now, none of that makes any difference. PLEX is force-transcoding everything, my settings be damned.
But even if I manually select a ridiculously low bitrate, for example I downgrade a 10kpbs 1080p video bitrate source to 2kpbs @720p, it still gets flushed down the PLEX toilet. This happens on both my ROKU PLEX app, which I typically use, or my Toshiba TV’s onboard FIRE-TV PLEX app.
I don’t know what to do. I defragmented my Library hard drives. They still have plenty of space on them, BTW. I optimized my PLEX database. I cleaned out the bundles. I unchecked the new AAC stutter setting for ROKU devices, since that apparent glitch hadn’t affected me before. But disabling or re-enabling that option made no difference; PLEX still can’t deliver the video. Nor does changing “Burn-in Subtitles”: Force to : Auto make any difference. The subtitles look different when I select “Auto,” but the video delivery still craps out.
Did some recent PLEX update purposely do this under the radar? Was it intentional? Is it a coding fail? As I said I hadn’t made any changes to my server settings for a long time, and everything in my library had been playing smoothly up to this point.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. The example of 2Mbps 720p was an illustration of how, no matter how low I change my default (Original) video bitrate in an attempt to solve the video playback problem, PLEX still can’t deliver the video without stuttering, pixellating, crashing.
To provide add’l information that may help me get some illumination from PLEX folks about what’s happening, I typically use my ROKU stick to watch titles from my PLEX library.
ROKU version: 10.50 • build 4208-55
PLEX APP (under Settings “gear” icon when I launch PLEX): 7.0.3.7619-04f59a8a8-PLEX
PLEX MEDIA SERVER (macOS 10.13.6): Version 1.25.8.5663
Another example of PLEX being screwed up:
I launched a film, an MKV file @1080p video bitrate @9000kb/s and DTS 6-channel audio @1500kb/s
Of course the crap hit the fan before the PLEX player even got through the opening titles.
So I paused the film, clicked on PLAYBACK SETTINGS>STREAM INFO and saw that it shows “Transcode(throttled)” with a message below saying “Incompatible AAC audio.” But the AUDIO IS DTS 5.1, not AAC. I triple-checked that, with macOS Finder, the MediaInfo application, and MKVToolNix.
So what is wrong with the PLEX player (or server) that it is misreading or misinterpreting the audio stream, telling me that it’s AAC audio and then force-transcoding it with the (throttled) note, which only adds insult to injury?
There should be no reason I can’t direct stream or direct play files from my local library, on an ethernet network, in PLEX without it mucking everything up.
As I said, it didn’t used to be this way. Something has happened on the PLEX side of things and I want to know what it is, or perhaps this can be considered a trouble report.
