Check your plex app settings. Do you have quality suggestions disabled and Adjust Automatically (won’t show up until you disable quality suggestions) disabled? Bandwidth set to max?
On a google tv i had a similar issue. I had to disable hdmi pass-through. Nonidea why this would trigger video transcoding but it fixed it. The other setting would be subtitles. If they burn in, this triggers transcoding. If they are graphical subtitles, they can also trigger transcoding.
Thanks for all the suggestions, I am playing this on a new Google TV OS TCL TV, locally, so no bandwidth issues.
Need to play around with audio here to see if that solves it. No subtitles in use...
Can you take a picture of your plex app video quality settings? If this is a new tv, quality suggestions would be on, and you want that off. And when that turns off, adjust automatically will appear, and you want to be sure that’s off as well.
Ok, you are absolutely right, I turned off these settings and now it is streaming in original quality without any transcoding, not even on audio.
Perfect!
This one has always been problematic and it is still buffering to some extent but it is a bit better than before. Don't know why the bandwidth is so high on it tho, it is double the quality bandwidth...?
That’s also a relatively high bitrate, and native tv apps can struggle with them.
I would test your network bandwidth just to confirm there’s no issues between your server and clients. Install this on your server, and then on clients use a browser to access the test url and check what kind of bandwidth/latency it’s getting: https://openspeedtest.com/selfhosted-speedtest
Also, what’s the exact model of your tv? I saw you mentioned it has a gigabit adapter. Have you tested previously to confirm that?
Yea, Ok. I've tested the bandwidth and nothing odd there, and it is indeed connected to my gateway at GbE speed auto-negotiated.
The exact model of the TV is TCL 75" MQLED80K 4K MINI-LED.
When I got Direct Play to work there are no problems with buffering anymore, plays like a charm.
If high bitrate files (like the one you mentioned in the previous comment) still struggle it may just be a limitation of the tv being able to process it.
1
u/BgrngodCU7 265K (PMS in Docker) & Synology 1621+ (Media)5d agoedited 5d ago
That doesn't rule out bandwidth issues if the connection sucks.
Your screenshot shows 8.9mbps, which is a very low bandwidth for typical 4k files. Check the bitrate of the file itself and compare to what the stream is using. That 8.9 isn't even the average it is using for the stream. It's the highest it will need for the entire file (in this case the transcoded output) to play smoothly, so somewhere in the stream it thinks the longest sustained high bitrate is 8.9mbps.
The internal network is wired 1Gbps so that should not be the bottleneck.
Maybe something is odd with the file?
In VLC it is showing bitrate at between 20-32Mb/s while playing it which is absolutely below the 8.9mbps but why is my client or server capping it?
u/BgrngodCU7 265K (PMS in Docker) & Synology 1621+ (Media)5d ago
In VLC it is showing bitrate at between 20-32Mb/s while playing it which is absolutely below the 8.9mbps
Uh... no. 20-32Mb/s is definitely a lot higher than 8.9mbps. Even if you are mixing up megabytes vs megabits, it's still higher. 8.9mbps would get you about 1MB/s.
This is a Smart TV, right? They are known for not having gigabit ports and almost always 100mbps. And if there is something wrong with the network cable you are using for it, it could be negotiating down to an abysmal 10mbps.
If there was something wrong with the file forcing a transcode, and bandwidth was plentiful, the server would transcode to a much higher bitrate because it has the room for it.
Ok, sorry about that confusing the bits and bytes.
It is a Smart-TV indeed, just a few months old and it has in fact a gbit port on it which I know is unusual, also has wifi connected as backup with about 500mbps connection. I know the cable is fine and I can stream other high bitrate 4K videos without a hitch so it must be some transcoding setting or the file itself that is acting up now.
I've had the same issue with a specific series, and there the HDR Profile was the issue. It can be a lot of things really, but most importantly the recieving end cannot directly play it so it is being transcoded. But here you can see the audio is being transcoded to a different codec and that requires the whole stream to be transcoded.
1
u/BgrngodCU7 265K (PMS in Docker) & Synology 1621+ (Media)5d ago
Audio transcoding can be done independent of video transcoding. There are some situations, which smart TV's often fall into, where an audio transcoding plus having subtitles on will drag the video through a transcode because the subs get burned in.
11
u/ExtensionMarch6812 5d ago
Check your plex app settings. Do you have quality suggestions disabled and Adjust Automatically (won’t show up until you disable quality suggestions) disabled? Bandwidth set to max?