I am wanting to use plex for watching videos on roku and remotely with my cell phone. I currently have Plex media server installed on my pc which has an AMD 965 black cpu. I have read that is plenty of power to transcode multiple streams at the same time. But I am still getting lag and pauses all the time. I do not believe my Unraid cpu is power enough to transcode, it ia a Intel Celeron E3400 2.6GHz dual core.

 

I am just trying to figure out if the problem has something to do with files being on separate pc than the media server. I have set up shares that are on plex to only use the cache drive, dont know if that is correct. Today I set up the temporary transcode folder for Plex server to be on the drive of the pc with the server. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

When I was evaluating Plex I had the following setup:

Desktop PC acting as a Plex Media Server - AMD 965 Phenom II Black

UnRaid Server with media

Separate HTPC

 

I had no issues with the above setup and with how you have things installed the UnRaid server CPU is not doing any transcoding, it is just acting as a file store.

 

Depending on what Roku you have and what container/encoding the media files are in then there are some known issues with Roku e.g. with MKV. As the issue is most likely not related to UnRaid I'd suggest posting on the Plex forums (forums.plexapp.com/index.php/) where they have a specific sub-forum for the Roku client.

 

As you have PMS installed on your Desktop PC then the temporary directories for PMS should all be on your Desktop PC not your UnRaid server. The only thing I would expect you to have on the UnRaid server with your description above is the actual media files.

 

You may also want to confirm that your network, switches, hubs are all running at gigabit speeds and you are not using wi-fi while you are doing trouble shooting to uncover the cause of the issue.

 

hth

 

TheWombat

 

I'm wired on everything on my lan and getting gigabit to everything. I still can't figure this out. Tried watching movie on my phone and I get pausing every 10-15 seconds.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

I'm wired on everything on my lan and getting gigabit to everything. I still can't figure this out. Tried watching movie on my phone and I get pausing every 10-15 seconds.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

What's the content?  AVI?  MKV?  This makes a huge difference on whether or not Plex needs to transcode on the fly.

 

I just posted on another forum where I realized my dual-core MacMini could not keep up streaming an AVI to my Roku3 unless everything else was idle on the system.

I have mostly mkv files. I did try an mkv bmi ray on the roku 2 and it was horrible. I'm also trying to stream to me cell and selecting 3mbps for quality and still get constant pausing.

 

I think my PC is plenty powerful enough, amd 965 quad core.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

Yeah, something is not right there.  To stream an MKV file to a Roku box is trivial.  All Plex is doing is just passing it through the network.

 

Sounds more like a bandwidth problem on your network, but that's purely a guess.  You can check the performance of your Plex server during streaming, but you should see hardly any rise in CPU activity during streaming.  May want to try just streaming it to a Plex client (on the same system as your Plex server and another system) and rule out any issues with getting the content from unRAID to Plex.

We were using Windows Media center with no problems. But I want to switch to plex. I have watched a few things on a plex client but it's a PC that doesn't need anything transcoded and it played fine. It seems like the transcoding is the problem. In wanting to use roku for one TV and set up raspberry pi in another room or two. But if I can't figure out the lagging it can't happen

 

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What version of the Plex server are you running?

I have a netgear wdnr3700 router but I did install dd-wrt on it and I made a QoS making plex a higher priority

 

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What version of the Plex server are you running?

In running the newest one released, I purchased plex pass. Sorry I'm at work but I believe it is .9.8.3

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

I have a netgear wdnr3700 router but I did install dd-wrt on it and I made a QoS making plex a higher priority

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

I have the same router and have dd-wrt on it as well but haven't changed the QoS settings. I doubt that the router/dd-wrt is the issue.

 

What Streaming Quality on your clients do you have? On the Plex forum some people have suggested increasing the streaming quality in order to not have the server transcode when it really doesn't need to.

 

Also ensure that PMS is not using UnRaid as a temporary transcode location as that will make it slow.

 

The Rokus (even the Roku 3) have had known issues with MKVs however the latest firmware update on the Roku in the last few days is meant to have greatly improved the MKV support.

 

TheWombat

 

I upgraded my CPU and Mobo in my unRaid server. I put in an i7 4770k