Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

Enos Cabell: Nov 3, 2004

Motronic posted:

Emby Effortpost 1.0

Problem statement: With the increasing pace of news from Plex as a company diverging from my use case of a local media server into an ad-driven free-to-view content provider that probably sells user data and definitely wants to try to make viewing habits on their platform into a social media thing, I started looking at alternatives so I have something usable if and when the time comes to move on.

The setup: Ubuntu 22.02.4 LTS VM on and ESXi box with essentially unlimited RAM and CPU as they apply to a media server, GTX 1060 passed through to the VM, VM sotred on an iSCSI share of a TrueNAS box connectecd with 10 GigE, media and cache/metadata shares on the same TrueNAS box (different arrays) mounted to VM via NFS. Mostly views on TVs with Rokus, some windows client usage, some mobile usage. Plex, jellyfin and emby were all installed on this same VM for testing purposes.

Optimal? No. Perfectly adequate for the last 10 years of running Plex? Absolutely. I only added the GPU in the last couple of years because of the need to transcode 4K for some of my remote users. Lot of the suboptimal decisions are because this setup is not dedicated to just running a media server, so it needs to live within the ecosystem of my basement rack and the other things it's there to do. Some of those choices are literally "because I thought it would be interesting to do it this way/try out this feature in mini-production."

Attempt 1 - Jellyfin: Besides being what seems like 5 years behind in features, the Roku client was hot garbage when I started out with this several months ago. The Roku dev team pushed a major update a couple months ago and they deserve a ton of credit. It's got a lot of bugs and usability items to be hammered out still, but it's now modern, cohesive and doesn't look like an afterthought checkbox item on the project. I'm sure it will become and remain a first class Jellyfin client. But with that solved, what other problems do we have? Let's start with the ones I consider more minor:

- Login/sign up remote experience: Plex has this nailed from the UX standpoint. Jellyfin hasn't bothered to do anything at all that I can tell. You make local accounts and then give the credential to your remote user who accesses the server in whatever way you have rolled to make it remotely accessible. I actually DO like that it's straight up HTTP so I can just point my already existing and port forwarded nginx install at it and things just work. If you're not very technical of a user this could be a hurdle, but that's not most of us so whatever.

- Administration:
Setting up libraries is reasonably straightforward, but there are about a million drop down boxes and it's not clear what they do exactly and why one would want to change the defaults. It's still not clear why I have 7+ different places to set metadata providers (per library) but I guess somtimes you might want to grab episode posters from one provider, series posters from another, descriptions from yet a third and, etc, etc, etc.......but I can't think of why. But if you can this just might be the setup for you.

Retrieving metadata and generating preview thumbnails (the things you see on the timeline when fast forwarding in Plex if you have that enabled) starts happening after you add the library. There is no indication of this happening most times, no real way to see what is happening other than by greping log files, no clear idea of progress or time to completion and everything slows to a crawl. The UI is basically unusable, even from a web browser. But it's just for this pesky initial scan, right? So we'll carry on.

IPTV setup seems pretty straightforward. Add an m3u, add an XMLTV source and/or SchedulesDirect login and it should just work, right? Wrong. I can't even begin to make sense of half of the things that went wrong from missing data to missing channels to things being in the wrong order that are solved by removing the m3u or xmltv and re-adding them and letting it scan again. It's not clear when the schedules will automatically refresh or if they even do, setting EPG data to a channel happenin in a pop up box that you have to scroll through and is completely unsuited to more than a handfull of channels. Get over 20 or 30 and you're in trouble.

- User experience:
The Roku client is severely lacking in UX for IPTV viewing based on a guide, sorting, favoriting, etc (but I'm sure it will get better as previously mentioned).

There exists some third party plug in for detecting intros, but it doesn't work on most clients, and if you want it to work on some of them you need to use a custom build of jellyfin. I ain't got time for this nonsense for a table stakes feature.

Now you're just minding your own business watching something and it stops. And you can't even get you client logged back into the server. So you give up, go back to Plex and carry on. Then later on it just seems to work again. Huh, I wonder what that was.

Finally you figure out that it's whenever it scans the library. And a library scan with no new items that takes under 90 seconds in plex, just under 2 minutes in emby and 3 1/2 hours in jellyfin. So you do the logical thing and fling resources at it. MORE CORES MORE RAM. Run a scan again with top opened and see that it's stuck on one core that it's pinging to 100% load, then you start searching and find literally YEARS of bug tickets related to this with no or snarky resposes from the devs and project participants. Including that old badly managed open source gem: "it's open source so if it's a problem you should fix it yourself." Also many, many "it will be fixed in the next release" or indications that it's fixed with the bug closed out and then just more related bugs opened with basically no progress or resolution. GPU seems to be used for transcoding to clients, but not for library scans. Or is it? Sometimes it seems to be.

Not only is the scanner killing the UI a deal killer, the way the project is handling it makes the entire project a deal killer. This is not a community I'm interested in participating in. So I regretfully moved on to.....

Attempt 2: Emby

This looks like grown up Jellyfin, potentially heading down the same path as Plex, but it's not that yet. They are monitized like Plex used to be - gating transcoding and some other features behind a monthly subscription (Emby Premiere), but they are also set up to make the same mistakes (lifetime pass) that requires coming up with new revenue streams.

Let's go through a similar list as jellyfin: Login/signup is the same but there is also an emby account that you can make where you can invite people to your sever instead of making a local account. I haven't looked into this yet. Same deal as Jellyfin with remote access. In fact, it's on the exact same port which makes for extra work if you're setting both up on the same machine. One annoying thing that's more my setup/my problem is that the clients autofill the default port as 8096 and for some reason I haven't been able to wrangle my nginx Proxy manager container to listen on that port (this type of container complexity is why I tend to ruin things directly on VMs). This means people need to change the to 80 or 443 in the client during setup and it's just another step that shouldn't exist. This is not really an Emby problem, it's just something that needs solving in my existing overcomplicated infra.

Coming from the same project, the library setup and scans look similar, but a much more grown up UI/UX. There are intelligent choices for generating preview thumbnails and detecting intros on library scan or only as a scheduled job. The scheduled jobs are obvious in their function, have progress bars, inform you of last run and duration of that run, and easily changed in time and max duration from the GUI. Scanning the libraries, downloading metadata and even generating thumbnails and detecting intros has minimal to no performance hit on the UI and immediately used the detected GPU to do its magic.

IPTV setup is again straightforward but actually works as expected. If your EPG data isn't automatically matched or you have multiple sources for the same stream there is an entire tab listing your channels that you can easily navigate and change options on a per channel basis. SchedulesDirect integration works as expected.

User experience: the Roku client is great. All the things you expect just work, including a timed/disappearing button to skip intros. Libraries are easy to navigate, look somewhat like plex, require no real work to figure out and the general layout of libraries and sections is configurable per login so you only need to do this once and it will be reflected on, in my case, all the rokus in the house. The Roku client for Plex can't do that. The only miss is on IPTV.....it's entirely usable, but there is no good way to scroll through the guide quickly - part of this is the roku remote just doesn't have extra buttons for this. I don't really know how I'd sove it - the built in Roku Live TV app kinda suffers from the same issues but it's more responsive. Perhaps it would be fine if the Emby app was more responsive as well. In the end, I just number/sort channels so that the most used ones are the lowest numbers and enything else/weird/one time use you can tab over to the "tags" tab and find them however your IPTV provider categorized them. It would be nice if when choosing a tag you got a guide-style display instead of just channel logos. Recording live TV as individual shows/movies and series works as expected. Pausing live tv and then re-starting later doesn't seem to work well or perhaps for very long. Not a big deal for my use case so I haven't really looked into it yet.

It took a couple of weeks of scanning to get my entire library scraped and with intros detected, but now that it's all done I have feature parity with Plex - again at least for my use case. I have all libraries set to detect intros and generate thumbnails on library scan with the *rrs set to trigger a library scan on import and I've had absolutely zero UI or playback issues regardless of what's going on. Transcoding just works for everything as I expect on the GPU including live tv. No shocker there, it all works in Plex also. This is another table stakes thing.

I have a 2-way watched/unwatch sync happening between Plex and Emby with https://github.com/ArabCoders/watchstate . I find I'm using emby exclusively now and the other inmates are going between it and plex depending on if they are looking for livetv or not. YoutubeTV usage is significantly down (I want it to be sero so I can stop paying $80/month for it and just use the IPTV sub). Overall I'd say this is a success. I need to figure out if/how I transition my users that I shared the plex server with. Like for most of you, that's going to be easy for some, miserable for others based on how technical they are or aren't.

Thank you for listening to my ted talk.

(quoted for new page)

Thanks for the effort post. I'm still mostly satisfied with Plex for now, but it's good to see that Emby is in a much better place than last time I tested it out a few years ago.

# ? Mar 28, 2024 18:35

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 28, 2024 19:36

Sir DonkeyPunch: Mar 23, 2007; I didn't hear no bell

forgive my ignorance here, but when you say IPTV, do you mean something like a HDHomerun, that's something I have to account for when thinking about switching. Specifically the family has discovered that Commercial Skip is way better on it than through the actual tv service we pay for.

# ? Mar 28, 2024 19:21

cruft: Oct 25, 2007

Motronic posted:

Emby Effortpost 1.0

Awesome effortpost, very helpful.

Didn't emby have an ebook thing in it? I seem to recall that, at least with what they aspired to do, it was a lot more in line with my needs for a thing I run for my family. Like maybe it had a better photos thing than Plex, too?

# ? Mar 28, 2024 19:51

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

Sir DonkeyPunch posted:

forgive my ignorance here, but when you say IPTV, do you mean something like a HDHomerun, that's something I have to account for when thinking about switching. Specifically the family has discovered that Commercial Skip is way better on it than through the actual tv service we pay for.

I'm talking about streaming TV that is presented as an m3u in particular, but yes.....HD Homerun would be configured in the same IPTV system. There are lists of public IPTV streams you can use to try this out, as well as public sources of xmltv style EPG data if you want to play around. Lots of it is "<insert market> <insert network> News" so it's not too exciting. But there are also a lot of free-to-view channels available, including the plex ones (retroplex, etc). There's a good list here: https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv

If there's any interest this should probably be it's own thread because it's a whole thing and you'll want more than plex or emby as part of this ecosystem.

cruft posted:

Didn't emby have an ebook thing in it? I seem to recall that, at least with what they aspired to do, it was a lot more in line with my needs for a thing I run for my family. Like maybe it had a better photos thing than Plex, too?

I have not tried that, and I don't recall seeing it (so perhaps it's a plugin I haven't installed?) but that sounds interesting. I also have not added my music library to it yet, which is something I occasionally used through plex. I was using Symfonium pointed at jellyfin to access my music libraries for a bit there but ran into the issues noted. I should add it to emby and chenge the back end. I believe that should just work.

E: no, it's not a plugin. I just didn't notice it in the add new library content type dropdown. Throwing a folder of a few thousand ebooks at it now.

Motronic fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Mar 28, 2024

# ? Mar 28, 2024 21:08

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

Do emby/Jellyfin have any options for native or near native support for Youtube agents? The plex one mostly works but has enough weird edges that it gets caught on that I'd be open to tying them out if there is a better option. Not a fan of a monthly sub though.

# ? Mar 28, 2024 21:38

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

Warbird posted:

Do emby/Jellyfin have any options for native or near native support for Youtube agents? The plex one mostly works but has enough weird edges that it gets caught on that I'd be open to tying them out if there is a better option. Not a fan of a monthly sub though.

I was doing some youtube downloading into Jellyfin way back when I first started messing with it and yes - I did get it to work somewhat reliably with an agent that I believe was a plug in. Things got better when I started embedding metadata into the files with the downloader. But it never did work 100% quite right so I nuked it and abandoined the idea for now. I had the same library pointed at plex and it was much worse to the point of not even being usable.

# ? Mar 28, 2024 22:17

kri kri: Jul 18, 2007

Lots of YouTube channels are in tvdb/sonarr might be worth checking out.

# ? Mar 29, 2024 02:52

Warbird: May 23, 2012; America's Favorite Dumbass

I did notice that but I�m not sure if my tastes would map. Might be worth a try though I�m not sure how that would play with my ad hoc nature of downloading stuff from ytdlp.

# ? Mar 29, 2024 05:12

Takes No Damage: Nov 20, 2004; The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.; Grimey Drawer

kri kri posted:

Lots of YouTube channels are in tvdb/sonarr might be worth checking out.

I was amused to see Sonarr/Plex recognize Car Boys as a 'real show' and import it accordingly.

Anyone else noticing a new category in their music libraries below Similar Artists called Sonically Similar Artists? Based on the name I'm assuming it's trying to group artists by comparing spectrograms or something, actually a neat idea if it's at all accurate.

Takes No Damage fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Mar 29, 2024

# ? Mar 29, 2024 05:48

Chillmatic: Jul 25, 2003; always seeking to survive and flourish

That�s the best Meshuggah album and I�ll hear no argument otherwise. :colbert:

# ? Mar 29, 2024 13:48

Bonzo: Mar 11, 2004; Just like Mama used to make it!

kri kri posted:

Lots of YouTube channels are in tvdb/sonarr might be worth checking out.

I discovered this by accident and it's really cool. Radarr does the same so if you see a doc or something not in TV, check out to see if it's in the movie DB

# ? Mar 29, 2024 16:58

kri kri: Jul 18, 2007

Bonzo posted:

I discovered this by accident and it's really cool. Radarr does the same so if you see a doc or something not in TV, check out to see if it's in the movie DB

Overseer is nice since it can search both immediately.

# ? Mar 29, 2024 18:29

Takes No Damage: Nov 20, 2004; The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.; Grimey Drawer

Chillmatic posted:

That�s the best Meshuggah album and I�ll hear no argument otherwise.

I go through my music library and whenever I find an artist with a default portrait I replace it with the cover of my favorite album of theirs :rock:

# ? Mar 30, 2024 05:14

Aredna: Mar 17, 2007; Nap Ghost

Any threads or good resources for IPTV?

I stumbled across this GitHub which has a ton of globally free streams. https://iptv-org.github.io/ [mods: I understand these as publicly free, but please edit/delete if I'm mistaken]

I'd love to set something up with some of these streams such that I can use them both locally and let family connect to use as well. I currently only have Plex connections public via port translation and would prefer not to open anything more complicated than that until I have time to set up proper security and reverse proxies.

E: Basically I'd love to have something as simple as Plex for friends and family to use, but for IPTV.

Aredna fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Apr 4, 2024

# ? Apr 4, 2024 17:44

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

I�m trying to put something together on YouTube that covers IPTV and Plex (and will most likely use that same IPTV source as demonstration just for legal ease). There�s� a lot to cover really.

So, Plex can do this kinda stuff but it is a bit of a chore so it�s not always the best for it. Sharing to other people will need them to be in your household (rather than regular friends, I think this maxes out at 10 people) as they disabled the loophole that allowed sharing of IPTV to anyone else. It doesn�t support channel groups and can be finicky about channel additions.

It might be easier to just install an IPTV client on their devices, but also are they going to be willing to deal with streams just not working or buffering/looping while watching something? I do a fair amount of upkeep on my setup to make it usable, as most providers just send you a mess of 10,000 channels that are badly organized and labeled with no EPG.

EL BROMANCE fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Apr 4, 2024

# ? Apr 4, 2024 18:00

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

EL BROMANCE posted:

So, Plex can do this kinda stuff but it is a bit of a chore so it’s not always the best for it. Sharing to other people will need them to be in your household (rather than regular friends, I think this maxes out at 10 people) as they disabled the loophole that allowed sharing of IPTV to anyone else. It doesn’t support channel groups and can be finicky about channel additions.

Where exactly does Plex know it's an IPTV? Is it monitoring processes to find evidence of using these certain sites urls?

# ? Apr 4, 2024 23:21

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

Doesn�t matter where the signal comes from, whether the internet or a HD Homerun tuner in your house - the Live TV function isn�t shareable to non-home members. Just a blanket ban. Someone obviously noticed and threatened them with a bad time if they didn�t take the feature out.

# ? Apr 4, 2024 23:36

The Gunslinger: Jul 24, 2004; Do not forget the face of your father.; Fun Shoe

Is there a good way to create stuff that will show up on shared users home screen areas? I have some elderly family members who can't seem to navigate the library and essentially live on the Recently Added and home pages. I want to create a curated section of stuff for them since they often remark that they can't find the show we're discussing or etc. Right now I just have a Movies and TV Shows library filled with stuff but when something disappears from the home/recently added/etc sections its like it ceases to exist for them.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 16:18

Bonzo: Mar 11, 2004; Just like Mama used to make it!

Add them to a Collection?

# ? Apr 5, 2024 16:28

The Gunslinger: Jul 24, 2004; Do not forget the face of your father.; Fun Shoe

Bonzo posted:

Add them to a Collection?

Do those pop up on their home screens or are they in a separate section?

# ? Apr 5, 2024 17:34

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

The Gunslinger posted:

Do those pop up on their home screens or are they in a separate section?

You have to do it in a specific way.

Make the collection as normal, then when you�re in the library view that shows the collection, click the vertical � button on the bottom right and choose Visible On > Frends� Home.

You can then manage this in the general settings screen when you go to the bottom and pick Libraries and then Manage Recommendations. I don�t think you can do it on a per user basis however, everyone either gets it or doesn�t.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 18:29

The Gunslinger: Jul 24, 2004; Do not forget the face of your father.; Fun Shoe

Thanks that's really helpful, I'll give it a shot this weekend.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 19:18

Cygni: Nov 12, 2005; raring to post

EL BROMANCE posted:

You have to do it in a specific way.

Make the collection as normal, then when you�re in the library view that shows the collection, click the vertical � button on the bottom right and choose Visible On > Frends� Home.

You can then manage this in the general settings screen when you go to the bottom and pick Libraries and then Manage Recommendations. I don�t think you can do it on a per user basis however, everyone either gets it or doesn�t.

holy poo poo this might be huge for me. never thought to click on the button on the collection itself for this sort of option, i thought i was stuck with only the stuff in Manage Recommendations.

thank you!

# ? Apr 5, 2024 19:46

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

Smart collections on the home library screen (show most recently added, organized in collections by networks, streaming platform, directors, and genres) are one of the things I miss with Infuse and/or Jellyfin.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 20:02

cruft: Oct 25, 2007

Oh, lovely, Roku is flirting with overlaying ads on your HDMI inputs.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 22:27

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

cruft posted:

Oh, lovely, Roku is flirting with overlaying ads on your HDMI inputs.

Okay then. I guess now that my Emby experiment is largely complete it's time to do set top boxes.

You're the Pi guy. Is there a meaningful remote setup and app ecosystem that would me suitable for set top box use to replace rokus or at least core features?

# ? Apr 5, 2024 22:34

Dyscrasia: Jun 23, 2003; Give Me Hamms Premium Draft or Give Me DEATH!!!!

My TCL Roku TV already did something like this until I turned off a setting. It was detecting what I was playing from my shield TV and added some sort of overlay related to what I was watching. I can't remember exactly what but I turned it off immediately. That was a couple years back now.

# ? Apr 5, 2024 23:24

Chillmatic: Jul 25, 2003; always seeking to survive and flourish

If you want a reliable remote and overall "just loving work" experience, without dog poo poo ads, then the only game in town is AppleTV. I don't know why people have this goofy allergy to them, but they're great devices and oh also they will not inject poo poo on top of your HDMI input.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 00:45

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

Chillmatic posted:

If you want a reliable remote and overall "just loving work" experience, without dog poo poo ads, then the only game in town is AppleTV. I don't know why people have this goofy allergy to them, but they're great devices and oh also they will not inject poo poo on top of your HDMI input.

I have no problem with them at all - other than my experience with the firt gen which is all I ever had. I thought it was great but it lacked the ability to HDMI CEC control the TV power and volume and didn't have an app ecosystem that worked.

If that's all been solved and the answer to everything is just buy one and put whatever magic app you all talk about on it I'm game. I'll do that on at least one TV for now and see how it goes.

I'm totally vendor agnostic. These are tools to me. I choose the one the does the job best at the right price point.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 00:57

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Chillmatic posted:

If you want a reliable remote and overall "just loving work" experience, without dog poo poo ads, then the only game in town is AppleTV. I don't know why people have this goofy allergy to them, but they're great devices and oh also they will not inject poo poo on top of your HDMI input.

The ultra nerds get mad about multi channel audio, they haven�t embraced the stereo life.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 02:13

Takes No Damage: Nov 20, 2004; The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.; Grimey Drawer

Matt Zerella posted:

The ultra nerds get mad about multi channel audio, they haven�t embraced the stereo life.

Pfft audiophiles. You only have two ears :rolleyes:

# ? Apr 6, 2024 03:36

Cygni: Nov 12, 2005; raring to post

Im sorta at my wits end with an issue my friends and now reporting regularly across multiple platforms and multiple file types and encoding. They are getting the "server is not powerful enough" warning and get buffering and lovely video quality. Looking at the logs, I think it is because Plex seems to think the bitrate is absolutely comical:

quote:

Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.428 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] Codecs: testing aac_mf (encoder)
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.428 [7496] INFO - [Req#35c907/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - MFT name: 'Microsoft AAC Audio Encoder MFT'
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.430 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Reducing playback quality for 11428kbps stream bitrate: audio channels to 2, quality to 34, disable video DS as 2147483647kbps is > the 11205kbps available, disable audio DS as 2147483647kbps is > the 151kbps available

quote:

Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.482 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] MDE: Dune: Part Two (2024): Audio Direct Streaming is disabled, so video's audio stream will be transcoded
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.482 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] Codecs: testing aac_mf (encoder)
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.482 [7496] INFO - [Req#35c907/Transcode] [FFMPEG] - MFT name: 'Microsoft AAC Audio Encoder MFT'
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.484 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] MDE: Cannot direct stream audio stream due to profile or setting limitations
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.484 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] MDE: Dune: Part Two (2024): selected media 0 / 94575
Apr 05, 2024 19:03:46.484 [7496] DEBUG - [Req#35c907/Transcode] Streaming Resource: Reached Decision id=68240 codes=(General=1001,Direct play not available; Conversion OK. Direct Play=3001,Not enough bandwidth for direct play of this item. Required bandwidth is 12218kbps and only 12000kbps is available. Transcode=1001,Direct play not available; Conversion OK.) media=(id=94575 part=(id=120435 decision=transcode container=mkv protocol=hls streams=(Video=(id=291973 decision=transcode bitrate=11205 encoder=h264_qsv width=1920 height=1080) Audio=(id=291974 decision=transcode bitrate=151 encoder=libopus channels=2 rate=48000))))

My bro, a x264 movie with 128kbps 2 channel AAC track in MKV container does not need 2.1TB/s of bandwidth. Hell the file dont even need the 12MB/s you are estimating the second time for directplay.

I reencoded the file with Handbrake to x265/mp4 with the same audio settings and... lo and behold, it immediately started DirectPlaying no problem.

Is there something im missing here? Been digging through the plex forums and reddit but nothing of value, the one dude with the same problem i could find just built a whole new server lol. I don't think its the hardware (11700k) or plex settings, and seems to happen with and without subs.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 05:21

IOwnCalculus: Apr 2, 2003

Are you actually trying to stream across a 12Mbps upstream, though? That looks like you have Plex set with a "limit upload bandwidth" of 12Mbps, and I've seen plenty of files where Plex and/or Tautulli just completely whiff on the bitrate and assume it's terabits per second.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 05:32

Cygni: Nov 12, 2005; raring to post

I'm pretty sure it is pushing a huge transcoded file out to the clients, yeah. Its a 1gig up connection, so i've got the Settings -> Remote Access -> Limit remote stream bitrate set to "Original (No limit)". Heres the Tatulli for the same playback:

e: another example, this time a x265, eac3 file with subs on... the only similar feature I can see between these two files is MKV and the the hardware transcode?

Cygni fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Apr 6, 2024

# ? Apr 6, 2024 05:39

IOwnCalculus: Apr 2, 2003

That's really weird if you don't have an upstream limit set, since it's also the wrong value to be Plex Relay loving things up. But that's what I get from that bolded log message, Plex is deciding it has a 12Mbps limit to work in and won't exceed it, thus forcing a transcode.

MKV is just a container; nearly my entire collection is MKV and I haven't run into this particular problem. Occasionally there've been lovely rips that just don't play nice and getting a better copy seems to solve everyone's problems.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 05:46

Cygni: Nov 12, 2005; raring to post

Also I love that its transcoding a file from 264 to 264 with no subs, and somehow inflating the video size more than 2x? It sorta feels like a transcoder bug of some kind.

e: i think i got the transcode page squared away as not the issue? (Z:\ is an NVME SSD transcodes scratch drive, error was occurring before i bought it too)

Cygni fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 6, 2024

# ? Apr 6, 2024 05:49

cruft: Oct 25, 2007

Motronic posted:

You're the Pi guy. Is there a meaningful remote setup and app ecosystem that would me suitable for set top box use to replace rokus or at least core features?

Uhhhhh... all I know of is LibreElec. I'm more of a server guy.

I'm still using Chromecasts and Plex, but it sure feels like I'll be going the way of Motronic at some future time. For this particular issue, I've only ever bought hospitality TVs, so unless ads start popping up in the Plex app, I'm good.

... oh no, that's a thing that could totally happen, couldn't it.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 14:51

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

Just lol.....went looking at the emby clinet for AppleTV marketing page. Looks awesome, very tight and finished looking. Get to the bottom and in tiny type:
* Live TV not yet supported

# ? Apr 6, 2024 15:22

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

I have all my IPTV stuff in Plex and working fine, but these days I mainly view stuff in the UHF client on my Apple TV. It�s not free, but it works pretty nicely and syncs across other devices which is neat.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 15:30

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 28, 2024 19:36

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

EL BROMANCE posted:

I have all my IPTV stuff in Plex and working fine, but these days I mainly view stuff in the UHF client on my Apple TV. It�s not free, but it works pretty nicely and syncs across other devices which is neat.

Huh - that looks like a really nice client. I'm not stuck on the idea that this has to be done in emby, just that it has to be done and there are no good Roku clients that I've found. This looks promising - I guess I'm buying a test device. Thanks for the pointer.

# ? Apr 6, 2024 15:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

«‹›318 »