Raspberry Pi 3 as Plex Media Server (local without transcoding)

Question

I bought my first Raspberry recently and I became addicted to it, I installed several things but mainly focused on making it become local Plex Media Server, by local I mean that it should not need to transcode anything.

I followed the steps on this tutorial with the difference that the media (shows and movies) are not stored in USB disk connected to the RPI, the disk is connected to a router that shares it. To be specific the router is a D-LINK Archer C2.

My Plex client and where I play the videos is a Samsung ue55h6400

Ok, so the issue is that, with videos with not very high quality it works perfect, no issues at all, but with 720p sometimes at the beginning it stops and shows the loading symbol for some seconds and then continues. With 1080p videos, it happens much more often...making it impossible to watch them, the thing is.......sometimes! another times even the 1080 videos are played without issues.

The question are: - Can I do what I plan to do? (no transcoding remember) I think is perfectly possible - How can I detect what is happening that provokes this "loading" issue?

RPI is running Raspbian Jessie, and installed apart from Plexmedia server, monit, deluge, couch potato and RPI-Monitor. Also PiHole is installed but nothing pointing to it at the moment. I'm connected by Ethernet, both pi and TV

Answer 1

Your potential problems:

your problem maybe due to video bitrate, you may have noticed that video from certain places such as a certain website or file type such as .mp4 may have less issues while playing video than other video file types or from different places. This is likely due to bandwidth limitations which is why videos using a lower bitrate or a highly compressed file type such as mp4 may be playing with less stutter than other videos.

Furthermore another problem that you may be facing is that it is likely that devices such as your tv may not support hardware decoding of certain file types which may be forcing the pi to decode the video or may be forcing the client to decode the video sans hardware acceleration which is what may be causing the lag.

My opinion on which on of these is most likely the problem:

The first paragraph is likely to be your true problem but also ties into the problem below that one. This is likely because the pi share bandwidth between the usb and ethernet because ethernet is simply a built in adapter, using a better usb to ethernet adapter may help with your problem. But also do keep in mind that your video must be loaded via usb off your hard drive then sent back over usb to the ethernet bridge via the same bus so stellar performance shouldn't be expected.

The solution: I recommend that you go through your video library at random and find out which ones that lag and look for a pattern in them, maybe they all have the same file type or maybe they all have a high video bitrate, and be sure to preform this testing with multiple client devices so that we can rule out client side lag. If your problem is consistent with videos of a certain bitrate you will likely need to re-encode those videos using software such as ffmpeg or similar to compress those videos and lower their bitrates.