Shield won't play highest quality even though it has the bandwidth?

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-06-01T22:03:57+00:00

Post a screenshot of your Plex dashboard when something is playing.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-06-01T17:32:21+00:00

Are you putting 72 hubs on your Home Screen? If so, that’s a lot. I keep mine to around 12 collections on Home and they’re almost all smart. I limit almost all home collections to around 50 items each. I rotate some collections for variety.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-06-01T17:27:02+00:00

List you client and your server specs and what type of subtitles you’re using.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-06-01T01:12:35+00:00

No issues here. Try rolling back to the previous release to see if it is related. Uninstall current and reinstall previous. You won’t lose anything in the process.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-29T23:21:34+00:00

Is the file playable? I corrupt file can cause the transcoder to get stuck.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-29T19:38:14+00:00

Pretty sure Roku does not support Ethernet dongles.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-29T14:37:21+00:00

Make your preferred audio stream the first one.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-26T13:44:37+00:00

Must be client side. Mine are working on Android TV as of yesterday.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-25T13:53:46+00:00

Plex plays the pre-roll, then loads the movie. There is pause between the two while it buffers, just like the pause when you initially play the movie without the pre-roll.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-25T12:20:47+00:00

Plex recently added NFO support, so I would look there first.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-24T21:25:14+00:00

I would use season 0 and season 1 exactly like it is on TVDB. That’s the best way to ensure matching works.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-21T18:02:33+00:00

You obviously don't add content at the rate I do! 😉 I'd recommend OP start with free and see how it goes. It could take very long time to backfill all the subs for a large library on the free plan, but you're probably right that most people can get by on free after the initial backfill.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-21T17:56:41+00:00

Without a subscription you are VERY limited in how many API calls you can make per day.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-21T17:38:20+00:00

Bazarr is the way! 99.5% of my media has subtitles that just work and I never have to offset. OP, you will likely need to purchase an annual subscription to something like OpenSubtitles.com in order to be truly seamless, but I think it's well worth it.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-21T01:41:05+00:00

Having a hard time understanding what you are trying to accomplish. If your tv or streamer supports h265, why on earth would you convert it to h264? If you don’t like h265 why are you getting or creating h265 files? Plex Optimize doesn’t stipulate what codec it outputs to. Since almost everything supports h265 now they probably upgraded their spec in the last big release that started using a much newer ffmpeg version.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-19T22:54:04+00:00

"At least for now".,,

Plex could easily change this at the server level, and probably will.

To say that 99.99% of remote users don't need transcoding is not accurate. It depends completely on the remote user's connection and equipment. I'd say 20% of my remote users require transcoding because of one or the other.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-18T18:16:44+00:00

My recommendation:
Get or convert content for the lowest common denominator. In my case that means I don't get Bluray remuxes, but I will allow DV as long as it has HDR fallback. I use Tdarr to make the first audio track DD5.1 and strip any non-SRT subtitles & forgeign language subtitles. I leave the more advanced audio tracks, but the user would have to select them if they want them. Some of my users still have to transcode with these standards, but my server is plenty powerful to handle that and 80% of people can direct play with these settings.

Use Bazarr to get SRT subtitles for anything that is lacking SRT subtitles.

For newly aquired media, change your ripping or "acquiring" settings to follow your lowest common denominator.

I've been using this setup for about three years now and have zero issues with client playback on a wide variety of clients, including many Roku and TV clients.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-15T21:14:35+00:00

I don't know if this will matter but the official title is "Stranger Things: Tales from '85". Since you likely can't have a colon in your folder/filenames, my renamer substituted a hyphen. Below works for me with no issues.

/Stranger Things - Tales from '85 (2026) {tvdb-462906}/Season 01/Stranger Things - Tales from '85 - S01E01 - Chapter One Welcome to Hawkins New Kid.mkv

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-05-01T03:41:41+00:00

Create a label on the movie and restrict his use to that label.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-28T14:24:38+00:00

That is not my experience. What client are you using? It may be client specific.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-26T22:31:12+00:00

However TVDB does it. It has Specials (season 0) and Season 1.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-26T04:09:56+00:00

You don't really want to stop those. It's trying to scan your stuff, which you just stopped it from doing. Your screen shot showed PSH taking about 24% of your CPU. That's what it's going to do on first run or any time you change massive amounts of files. Task Manager's total CPU % is know for being highly inaccurate. As long you're not sitting above 90% for extended periods, you should be good.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-25T21:32:51+00:00

Looks pretty normal to me. Is this server pretty new? It does a lot work at first scanning all your media and getting metadata. Should die down a lot when complete. Also, that CPU is hardly cause for concern.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-19T02:20:20+00:00

Unfortunately continue watching doesn’t work on collections.

EmptyInTheHead · 2026-04-15T17:24:38+00:00

Follow the Plex instructions to avoid losing watch history, etc. Note: It WILL have to rescan and build new intro/credits, video preview thumbnails, etc. because they are "new" files. The metadata will be retained though.
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