I’ve had trouble streaming Plex in the bedroom, 4K content only. Lot’s of buffering/stutters.

I still haven’t got around to networking the bedroom to Ethernet, just WiFi.

Out of curiosity I opened VLC on the bedroom Nvidia Shield, and there’s an option to access devices on the local network, including my NAS. Opened the file directly and it only buffered once, slowed for about a minute (the audio sounded like my cat playing with my turntable lol) but then it caught up in 30 sec or so and streamed flawlessly after.

Not sure why it worked better, but figured I’d post here as a hack for others in similar situations.

  • @reddig33English
    4•3 days ago

    Not sure how your plex server is set up, but if it’s trying to transcode the content, that could be introducing lag. Some settings to try:

    • check server for DirectPlay and see if turning it on makes a difference
    • make sure the max video setting is 4k on the server so it’s not forcing a transcode down to something lower res
    • there’s a “how much processor to use” setting on the server as well — try turning it all the way up
    • try playing something then look at the activity page on the Plex server to see what it’s doing (is it transcoding for example)

    Other than this, try posting over at the forums on the Plex website if you don’t get an answer here.