Got my new server stood up last night and wanted to give Plex a test run.  The docker installed fine and I moved a few pieces of media to my array as a test case.

 

The house is setup for wired gigabit. I have multiple plex clients to test from, Fire TV sticks, XBox 360, XBox One, Windows PCs, Windows Phones, Windows Surface.

 

Any of the DVDs I tried to play looked fine but when trying to play a 1080p rip of Insurgent I got heavy artifacting on all players except my windows pc.

 

This leads me to think that there is some problem transcoding the media.  When the movie is playing I am only seeing about 25-30% cpu utilization on my Xeon E3-1241 V3 3.5GHz.

 

When I'm playing locally, ideally I'd like the media to not get transcoded but that wont be possible because the 360 is picky about its format.  All of my media is ripped directly from the disc and hasn't been previously transcoded, just remuxed as a test into mkv containers from VOB files.

 

Some things I tried to eliminate:

- Made sure I had Plex setup to transcode to my ssd cache drive

- Tried both wired and wireless clients, specifically Windows Phone, XBox 360, Fire TV stick, and windows pc

- I tried setting plex to the hurt my cpu setting

 

I dont have the full information on the files Plex was chewing on in front of me, but will update tonight.

 

Any thoughts on some other things to test/evaluate/change settings of to try to diagnose and fix this problem.

 

Full parts list for my setup:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/PnPqCJ

 

 

Got my new server stood up last night and wanted to give Plex a test run.  The docker installed fine and I moved a few pieces of media to my array as a test case.

 

The house is setup for wired gigabit. I have multiple plex clients to test from, Fire TV sticks, XBox 360, XBox One, Windows PCs, Windows Phones, Windows Surface.

 

Any of the DVDs I tried to play looked fine but when trying to play a 1080p rip of Insurgent I got heavy artifacting on all players except my windows pc.

 

This leads me to think that there is some problem transcoding the media.  When the movie is playing I am only seeing about 25-30% cpu utilization on my Xeon E3-1241 V3 3.5GHz.

 

When I'm playing locally, ideally I'd like the media to not get transcoded but that wont be possible because the 360 is picky about its format.  All of my media is ripped directly from the disc and hasn't been previously transcoded, just remuxed as a test into mkv containers from VOB files.

 

Some things I tried to eliminate:

- Made sure I had Plex setup to transcode to my ssd cache drive

- Tried both wired and wireless clients, specifically Windows Phone, XBox 360, Fire TV stick, and windows pc

- I tried setting plex to the hurt my cpu setting

 

I dont have the full information on the files Plex was chewing on in front of me, but will update tonight.

 

Any thoughts on some other things to test/evaluate/change settings of to try to diagnose and fix this problem.

 

Full parts list for my setup:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/PnPqCJ

 

Most of devices you mention are wireless, did you test on wired devices?  Blu Ray rips have high bitrates that 2.4GHz wireless just can't handle very well even without neighboring AP competition.

I think it was the source media.  I reripped that particular bluray with makemkv and it played fine.  I tried to do some comparisons between the two files but couldn't diagnose what particularly caused the plex transcoder to hate it so moved on to other problems.