Plex performance issues vs VLC

[rcfant89]

Whenever skipping around or opening files in plex from my desktop, I'm getting these messages:

It seems to alternate between the two. Problem is, I'm running 1 Gbps directly to the server (wired) and my server has 32 cores (2 physical CPUs), 32 GB of ram, etc. So I know neither of those error messages are legitimate.

The problem does not exist when opening a file in VLC from either machine, only while playing back via a browser in plex.

I think the issue is due to transcoding, but I've never seen the issue before on any other media so that's curious. Could it be that this movie is messed up? It plays fine, just slow through plex. And can't my server transcode this better?

Thanks.

 

[danageis]

In my experience both of these seem to be standard error message plex throws when it runs into stuttering in a video, but they are not necessarily related to bandwidth or server performance issues.

Most issues with stuttering in plex I have run into have been client sided. Best fix I have found is to set video quality to 'original' in the client settings, if possible. This will disable transcoding and attempt to stream the same video that is on the server, which works best in my experience. The problem is that if the video on the server is in a format not playable by the client device (for instance if the client is a device that can't play h265 or something) then this won't work. Also, if you are using subtitles in the video, streaming original quality video won't help much either because plex still needs to perform transcoding to print subtitles.

If either of these are true for your client and you can't disable transcoding, the best option I have found is to decrease streaming bandwidth. This has helped me in a lot of cases, because when streaming to an underpowered machine at high bit rates the client can't seem to keep up with the stream and stutters (happens with my fire TV stick streaming at > 20mbps for example). Its unfortunate since it sounds like you have a really nice server configuration to stream from, but my guess would be client sided bandwidth is the issue.

 

[rcfant89]

Would it be possible that the graphics card on the client is the issue? My GPU in my desktop computer sucks. It was a very nice build 7 years ago (i7 2600k, ssd, gtx 570) but the graphics card is terrible now. Even just browsing the web and playing a bunch of youtube videos the graphics card can't keep up. For example if I have a plex video open and paused, and a full browser full of youtube tabs on each monitor (or even just a few like 3 a piece), it gets very bogged down. But when I check task manager, I'm only using 40% of my ram (16 GB) and none of my CPU basically so it has to be the graphics card. Plus sometimes the screen messes up, like turns all green or something so it's gotta be gpu related.

I'm not sure if that would affect plex though...?

 

[danageis]

I wouldn't think the graphics card would affect plex. If you want to check though, if you're using Chrome you can disable hardware acceleration in the settings and see if that helps at all.

 

[rcfant89]

Hmmm not sure what else it could be then. Maybe the disks in the RAID array I guess. I replaced them with slower disks (still should be plenty fast) but maybe they were initializing or doing some other things simultaneously.

They were slow at first but have seemed to speed up. I haven't been getting the issues lately it just went away on its own.