Hi Guys - I'm new the forum, but I've been using Plex for about a year. I've run into a problem with playing some, not all, 1080p videos in my library. I've also managed to find the "fix" (workaround) to now get them all to load & playback successfully... but I don't understand why, or what is/was wrong, or if I really need to fix something else (root cause). I never had any 1080p playback issues up until maybe 3-4 months ago... probably dating back several PMS updates. Looking for some insight from the Plex gurus...
PMS System Info
PMS running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS within an Oracle VirtualBox VM hosted on Win7.
Ubuntu OS is fully updated & I'm running the latest PMS version (0.9.16.4).
Video files are sitting on the Win7 host, exposed to Ubuntu through VB's shared folders function.
The Plex Ubuntu VM has been allocated 2 CPUs from an Intel Core i7-3770k @ 3.5GHz, 3 GB RAM, 50GB disk (75% full).
Plex Clients
Tivo Roamio Plex app
Roku 3 Plex app
No external clients.
Network
The PMS server is hardwired, cat6, full duplex 1Gbps.
Both clients are hardwired, cat6, full duplex 100Mbps.
Problem
All 720p video (that I've tested anyway) loads and plays back - no problem.
Some of my 1080p videos also load and plays back - no problem.
However, some of my 1080p videos refuse to load when I press "Play" on the Plex client. I'll press Play from the movie overview screen, the client changes to the "loading in" screen... and it either just times out (Tivo Plex app).. or sometimes will show loading screen that stalls at like 13% and errors out (Roku).
From the client side, I get messages such as:
"Video Unavailable. We're unable to play this video, makes sure the server is running and has access to the video." (Roku)
After enabling verbose logging on the PMS & running through a problematic 1080p load on the client, I saw nothing in the Plex Media Server.log file that was an obvious error.
Fix / Work-Around
In the Plex client app, I went into Settings -> Video -> Local Quality and changed the setting from 12Mbps 1080 to 20Mbps 1080.
"Allow Direct Stream" was left alone (enabled).
"Direct Play" was left alone (Auto).
"Maximum H.264" was left alone (4.1 Recommended).
Now all of my (tested so far) 1080p videos load and playback wonderfully!
My question - why?
