Best way to fix my absolutely horrible Plex Server setup

[Overloke]

This post is mostly so people can laugh at me. I'm prepared for it. I know all of this was a bad idea when I set it up.

 

I was trying to watch a movie last night - .mkv, 16mbps bit rate, 4K - and I noticed when running it through Plex, it was having a bit of a struggle - pausing every minute or so, buffering, things like that. When I run the same movie through VLC, it works no worries.

 

Now, I am not ignorant of my dogshit media setup. Part of the reason I did it this was was a) I just wanted to see if I could, and b) it was just meant to be a stopgap measure until I bought more hardware. Needless to say, step b never panned out.

 

I have a media computer hooked up to my dumb TV - a Pentium CPU of some kind, a GT 1030, and 4 (four) GB of DDR4 RAM. I know, I'm planning to buy an 8GB stick, I'm just lazy as hell. Running Plex through Chrome obviously caused some grief, because Chrome immediately ate up 700MB of RAM without me even having a tab open.

 

Furthermore, my horrific Plex Server setup is as follows: 8 cores-worth of an Intel Xeon E5-2670v3 and up to 8GB of RAM (dynamic memory allocation). It's running on a Windows Server VM, running in Hyper-V on a different Windows Server box. Here's the kicker - my media files are on a DIFFERENT server, on an 8TB drive. So - and here's the bit that will make you throw up in your mouth - I mapped the drives from my data server onto my Plex server machine, and then made those mapped drives the library locations in the Plex server settings.

 

My questions are as follows:

1. How much processing does the Plex server do on its end, in terms of transcoding and things like that? The bare-metal server that the Plex VM is running on has a GTX 645 (that is not a typo, I have no idea where I got that OEM card from), but it's not passed through, since I have no idea how to do it on Hyper-V.
2. Is any of it offloaded to the GT 1030 on the media servers end? Is there a benefit to transcode vs non-transcode? The settings in Plex seem pretty obfuscated when it comes to what's best for the computers at each end.
3. What are the odds that all my issues steam from media files having to go from file server > Plex VM > media PC instead of just file server > media PC?
4. If I move the 8TB drive to the main server hosting the VMs, can I pass-through the storage without mapping drives? Does that make them disappear from the host machine?

Yes, I could just run the Plex server ON the bare-metal server, but I was going through a bit of a VM experimentation phase at the time, you know, segmenting bits and pieces to keep the main, bare-metal server clean. Don't lie, we've all been there.

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, Overloke said:

How much processing does the Plex server do on its end, in terms of transcoding and things like that?

If it’s transcoding…. A lot. Transcoding 4k is not what you want to be doing. If it’s not transcoding, it uses effectively no CPU or GPU power. Sounds like you are transcoding, which means your playback device doesn’t support the media your playing (likely a codec issue… tv, or receiver, or chrome Plex client, or multiple) don’t support the file and are forcing a transcode.

 

3 minutes ago, Overloke said:

What are the odds that all my issues steam from media files having to go from file server > Plex VM > media PC instead of just file server > media PC?

None at all. You’re talking about an 18mbps file…. Networking is 1000mbps assuming a gigabit LAN which has been the standard for over 20 years as this point. This is not your issue. I run my homelab like this. Plex runs in a Ubuntu server VM with my movies in a TrueNAS VM, I have my movies directory network mounted in the Ubuntu VM, this is normal and how real enterprises actually function. 
 

Your setup is “fine”. I lost you a bit with where everything is running, but nothing there is the issue. I guarantee the issue is you are not actually direct streaming the 4k media, and that is forcing a transcode, and the 1) hurts quality but 2) that PC likely can’t handle it. 
 

If VLC works, my assumption is the Plex chrome client can’t. Get yourself an nvidia shield tv pro (get the pro, not the cheaper cylindrical stick version, the pro has greater codec support), and use that as your plex playback client plugged into your TV. 

[johnt]

The issue here is streaming a movie through Chrome. I'm pretty sure that Plex will 100% transcode for Chrome... no matter the content, native resolution, or whatever. Also, the free version does not use hardware transcoding whatsoever.

 

You could probably remedy this issue by downloading a proper app for Plex on your OS instead of streaming through a browser.

[Overloke]

  

4 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

If it’s transcoding…. A lot. Transcoding 4k is not what you want to be doing. If it’s not transcoding, it uses effectively no CPU or GPU power. Sounds like you are transcoding, which means your playback device doesn’t support the media your playing (likely a codec issue… tv, or receiver, or chrome Plex client, or multiple) don’t support the file and are forcing a transcode.

It does seem that way. I disabled transcoding in the Plex server settings, and got an error that said "Not enough cpu for conversion of this item", which is a sort of generic error when almost anything goes wrong during the playback when transcoding is disabled. My VM CPU is pinned at 100% when playing content with transcoding enabled - admittedly, it's only 2.3GHz due to it being a bit of an older Xeon.

 

Funnily enough, giving the VM an extra 4 cores, bumping it up to 12, seemed to mostly alleviate the problem, although it's still running at 100%.

 

I don't want to shell out for a Shield Pro. I think my dad has a Chromecast with Google TV or whatever that he doesn't use. Would that work? Worst case - I just use VLC. It's not a huge problem.

3 minutes ago, johnt said:

The issue here is streaming a movie through Chrome. I'm pretty sure that Plex will 100% transcode for Chrome... no matter the content, native resolution, or whatever. Also, the free version does not use hardware transcoding whatsoever.

 

You could probably remedy this issue by downloading a proper app for Plex on your OS instead of streaming through a browser.

Cheers, I'll give it a look.

[LIGISTX]

12 minutes ago, Overloke said:

I think my dad has a Chromecast with Google TV or whatever that he doesn't use.

If it’s the 4k one, yea. 
 

I play back full 4k 80mbps bluray rips, Dolby Atmos, Dolby vision, etc on 6 threads of my e5 3660v4…. And it uses about 5% CPU usage tops. Your issue is transcoding, and that needs to be addressed with either different source media, or a different client device. 
 

If you have an Xbox series, or ps5, maybe either of those would play it back better then the PC is simply because of codec support. Give it a shot. Can try the chromecast as well. 

[Overloke]

Well, as an update, after my media PC started shitting the bed and power cycling itself (no idea why, reseating the RAM seemed to do the trick, I hate computers), I downloaded the Plex Windows application, and started the same movie.

 

1% CPU usage on the Plex server, no worries. However, now my media PC's paltry GT 1030 was pinned at 100%, my Pentium CPU was at about 60%, and my RAM was at 90% (although, again, I only have 4GB, need to upgrade).

 

I disabled video transcoding in the Plex application settings, and the media PC GPU and CPU usage both dropped to about 40%. RAM was still high, but I think that's just something I'll need to deal with.

 

However, when I went into fullscreen, the Media PC blue-screened with an nVidia driver error. As of right now, the PC is powered on, but nothing is displaying on my TV.

 

Teaching sand to think was literally the worst decision in humanity's history and I despise technology with a fervor that is unmatched in this current day and age.

[Overloke]

I am now getting nvlddmkm.sys bluescreen errors every single time I manage to boot into Windows on my Media PC, which is only about one out of every four attempts. Every other time, the system just locks up on the Gigabyte logo screen, or while the Windows loading spinner is in moving. It even froze on the Windows Advanced Boot options page, before I could boot into Safe Mode with Networking (to try and download a new driver and DDU).

 

Somehow, putting Plex into fullscreen mode has now irreversibly damaged my nVidia GPU driver, and after dealing with about four other computer-related issues today in the space of the last hour and a half, I've come to the conclusion that I no longer care, and will be going back to bed at the ripe old time of 3.25pm. Today is a write-off.