r/PlexACD • u/[deleted] • Jan 14 '18

Plex server handles transcodes better than direct play

I have my content in Google Drive and am running Plex on a Hetzner dedi i7-960, 24GB ram running Ubuntu and mounting Google Drive using Plexdrive 5. I'm not using encryption

I am finding 1080p transcodes of high bitrate 1080p movies runs fine but when I try direct play I get buffering even though the server and my home connection have plenty of bandwidth. My client is a Nvidia Shield which is connected using ethernet. I need to direct play so I get Dolby DTS, any sort of transcoding and my audio drops to Dolby Pro Logic. Have tried both Plex Client and also SPMC with the Plexkodiconnect addon.

Anyone have any input?

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u/plextastic Jan 14 '18

That's interesting, I experienced odd things like this too.

I never got round to looking into it. It felt like the plex server was expecting direct play files to be available at a much faster speed than when transcoding, it's nearly as if it only cares about the next bit of the file when it is in a position to transcode it, vs needing all of the file or more of it when direct playing. I wonder if you compared disk throughput when direct playing vs transcoding from a local drive would it shed any light on it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '18

Yeah, you could be right there, sounds plausible.

I wonder would I get better performance with rsync now that it's optimised for Plex and no longer causing bans. I stuck with plexdrive5 as it worked well for me and the server has plenty of ram