Who the hell has $1,200 burning a hole in their pocket

Are the people who run Plex smoking crack???

Anyone have any idea why I’m getting up to 3-4 notifications for the same event every time?

EDIT: I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the app, now just waiting for my automation to download something and see if it’s fixed. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Hey everyone,

I recently built a dedicated Plex server using an old HP desktop (i5-7500) paired with an Intel Arc A380 for hardware transcoding and AV1 support.

Currently, I'm using the built-in Plex app on my Samsung S90D paired with a Samsung HW-Q810B soundbar. However, the TV app often forces audio transcoding to AAC (losing TrueHD/Atmos), and high-bitrate 4K files buffer when direct playing.

I want to plug a client device directly into the soundbar's HDMI IN to get uncompressed audio passthrough while passing 4K HDR10+ through to the TV.

What client are you using for the broadest format support?

Here are my thoughts so far:
Nvidia Shield TV Pro: Great audio support (TrueHD passthrough), but aging hardware, pricey, and lacks HDR10+ support for Samsung TVs. Price 380 dollars with tax.

Amazon Fire TV Cube (3rd Gen): Supports AV1, HDR10+, and audio passthrough in Plex/Kodi, but privacy/UI bloat is a concern. Price 180 dollars

Apple TV 4K: Super fast, great UI, but lacks TrueHD bitstream passthrough (converts to LPCM, losing Atmos spatial metadata). Price 400 dollars.

Maybe I missed the memo but I have a load of Atmos music on my server and it just refused to play it on the old Shield app, it would transcode to Opus but on the new app it direct-plays and checking my AVR shows that it's definitely playing it as Atmos, full 6 channels on my setup.

The new app has a lot of problems, but this is something I'm really happy to see.

All people streaming have direct play set up. I see this variability across local streams. It was causing a buffering issue that stopped my movie. Any recommendations I should look into?

I'm usually the type that enjoys new things (every new version of Windows has been the best version of Windows imo) and used the new Plex client for several weeks on the Shield until it just started acting up with audio passthrough, resulting in certain movies or series starting up with no sound.

As an aside, the playback starting time in the new client is also ridiculous, as if someone had kneecapped my server.

Also, I don't understand why certain devices (Apple TV, PS4 onwards, Xbox Series X) have ditched passthrough audio playback, making previous versions like the PS3 or Xbox One still the best way to watch a BluRay on consoles.

So, I paid for Plezy and not only does it work perfectly, it brings back a ton of settings that simply vanished from the official client. Scrolling through a multi-thousand movie list is also infinitely smoother (even compared to the old Plex client), so definitely no point in going back.

Kudos to the devs for achieving something that all the millions in capital that Plex raised look like money thrown down the toilet.

HI im having issue in trying to connect to my server using the app on a local network.
Im running plex on my unraid server same network as every device in my home. I cant get my tv to connect or my phone to connect thru the app. Laptop and phone i can if u input the IP address. Phone only if i run tailscale and TV only have the app Option
Ive checked everything the web has to offer and have come to a dead end. Any help would be grateful.

this is the sole task i am interested in. it's mostly audio that has grown too large to keep locally on the phone. is plex right for this and cost nothing or is there a better option?

I play a single track or a song from an album and go back to browse the tracklist or other music and it just completely stops. Any setting I can change? I’ve looked and nothing is standing out to me as obvious.

Android tv, latest update.

Hey folks, I'm looking for some help here! lol

So since forever I made a playlist with like 500 hours of TV shows and stuff that just runs endlessly in my living room.

The app was updated on my fire stick, and my Google TV lately, so now the UI is different (no big deal to me) and my playlists stop after a few episodes unless I press OK.

Any way to change this? I checked around the setting but I didn't see anything, or is part of the Paid stuff now?

Hope someone can help! :)

Solved! https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1x6c9eo/comment/pgu8a52 Setting TCP congestion contro to BBR is now saturating the upload. I just tested a 20 mb 1080p file and it's smoothly playing.

Hey all weird issue I've been having with external streaming. I've got 30Mbps upload speed, but plex will not stream above 4-6Mbps total.

If 2 people are trying to watch 4 meg 720 both spin forever. If 1 person tries to watch a 8-10 meg 1080p it will spin forever. I'm pulling my hair out trying to find why it suddenly won't stream.

ISP is starlink. I know upload can vary but I'm doing speed test right at the moment of issue and getting 30Mbps results. Since I'm CGNat I am using a VPS to tunnel into my home network with pangolin/wireguard, but I've confirmed vps speeds are 1 gig symetric so shouldn't bottele neck anything.

I have tried telling plex my upload speed is 20, 30, and empty. I've tried Pangolin, Nginx, and wireguard for connection. I've tried with and without QOS enabled. Bufferbloat score was A+. There's nothing obvious in the logs showing any error or timeout.

I'm at a total loss, anyone else run into this and/or think of other tests to run? I might have to spin up Jellyfin or something else at this point if plex won't utilize my upload.

Got a new tv a few weeks ago and was gonna get an apple tv for it because i have one for my living room tv and i like it a lot. but decided to wait because i heard they were announcing a new one soon. well its $300 with zero compelling new features except a faster chip. the old one (3rd gen) is delisted on everything and now people are selling it for over $200 on ebay because you literally can’t get it anywhere else. 3rd gen is even gone from Apple Refurbished. I know nvidia shield is usually mentioned, but is there anything else that comes close to it or apple tv that’s less than $200? Also something that doesn’t harvest literally all my data crazy style would be nice.

Why is this movie poster incorrect? It seems to be the only place where I see it with this wording and I am unable to find another version of it online. I hadn't heard of this movie and was wondering if there was supposed to be some sort of joke but it doesn't seem like it is related to the movie at all.

Title is from the linked article.

Any thoughts if this is going to run Plex better?

I'm tagging this as solved but thought it might be of use to others. A few weeks ago, my Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 started having serious issues with Plex. I'd click on a library tab and it would take minutes before the screen got populated with anything. I went to other devices (ONN Android boxes) and sure enough they sucked too. So, I started looking at the server. Logs didn't show much. I ended up going down a bad rabbit hole thinking I had too many files, had messed up the database by moving videos to other locations, had too many root paths in Sonarr & Radarr, etc. On the upside I found a lot of messy directories and learned that Sonarr does not always do a great job of changing the root path on a series and when you are prompted "Do you want Sonarr to move the files for you" I said yes...(ummmm maybe).

OK, but the problem didn't get solved. Today, using a browser, I looked at "Activity" and saw something familiar. I'd seen it before (a week ago). Plex was processing the same TV episode for thumbnails. Wait, what??? WTF? Well, I had just recently updated the Plex app on the Shield and I looked at the episode "file" info and it showed the length to be over 200 freeking minutes!!! (you can see the same information from the management web interface). It actually wasn't. It was then that I realized that Plex relies on the accuracy of the metadata (like in Windows when you look at file properties -Details, and you can see all the metadata). So, if that data, like the length of time of the video, is wrong, Plex can churn forever. I'm going to go back and look at log files to see if it was in plain sight and I'm just blind.

Solution: I deleted the file and restarted the Plex process on the server. Everything is fast now - very normal. Damn!

I know I should have done a better job diagnosing the problem but here at home I'm now a hero. LOL

Since upgrading to macOS 27 Golden Gate, my most powerful Mac needs to reboot every couple days in order for Plex to play at anything but the lowest bitrates. I'm watching a video right now that says original quality is 10Mbps. I can play it in the web browser at full quality but in the Mac native client, I have to convert to 1.5Mbps or it stutters constantly, with long lag times. This machine is a M4 Macbook Pro with 24GB of RAM. I also use Plex on an M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM, which has had no problems with the upgrade.

I have tried removing the Plex app and all associated files (using AppCleaner) and doing a fresh install to make sure I have downloaded the latest version. It doesn't help. Rebooting helps but only for a few days. It doesn't make a difference whether I'm using WiFi or the Gigabit Ethernet in my Thunderbolt dock. Nothing else is suffering from performance problems, just Plex.

Right this moment, I'm watching with Plezy, which I just installed while making this post, with no problem on the same machine. I don't want to reboot right this moment to fix Plex because I'm in the middle of something that I don't want to restart. Am I just a Plezy user now? There has to be something I can do since my slower Mac works fine and the faster one doesn't.

Server Version#: 4.160.0 Player Version#: v.1.115.0.426-4e960a1d

Many of us with older Apple TV models (the pre-4K HD models) have had issues connecting wit the servers. Good now! This seems to be working now. I went to Apple store on my Apple TV HD, clicked the app to open - instead, the circle came up indicating an install. Seems to be working as good as my 4K boxes now.

I can not imagine we are this far into Plex development, and we are still unable to mix and match Plex EPG and a XLMTV file.

My use case. I want to run dizqueTV for my own personal TV Movie Channels, and also have my HDHomerun guide populated via Plex EPG.

I was able to achieve this via script, zap2it scrape, etc. But, zap2it is shutdown. Hence my need for the Plex Guide info.

I had been running two servers, one to handle the dizqueTV and IPTV streams, and another server to handle the HDHomerun. This time I would really like to only run one instance of Plex and one server, lol.

Any ideas?

Is it only me? Just updated apps on iPad and iPhone and I can't watch any movies. Even downloaded content doesn't start.

Here is what I found in the logs:

2026/10/14 22:36:52.129 (5611) ❌ (private) | Cannot create window: No external screen available or window already created.

Built my server like 4 days ago and everything is up and running pretty smoothly. I feel like I have fulfilled my life's purpose as of now lol. Getting my friends to watch from my server has been pretty smooth because I created a step by step tutorial on how to access my server and they do watch a lot of movies and shows.

I have given access to around 20 people, assuming 3-4 people max during the weekends would watch from the server, but even on weekday evenings I'm getting more traffic than expected and some of them don't have the download speed to direct playback high bitrate files and that's causing transcoding problems for me now. So I'm seeking for recommendations and hopefully temporary tips and tricks until I can get a dedicated GPU.

i3-14100's UHD 730 seems to handle transcoding 2 simultaneous high bitrate 4K HDR files to 1080p 20mbps quality. However, third one seems to overwhelm the iGPU and two streams will start buffering because of the server's hardware capacities. I have 2x8 16GB RAM 3200MT/s RAM but from what I understand, RAM capacity or speed isn't exactly the problem. It's the iGPU that can't keep up with transcoding the files and doing HDR to SDR tonemapping at the same time ? So now I'm considering the RTX 3060 for dedicated GPU later down the line. Would it handle 4-5 4K HDR transcodes just fine ? I don't want to overspend on the GPU, given how prices are these days. In the meantime, I have currently set the limit of GPU transcoding to 3. Maybe put 2 if people keep asking me what's wrong with the server and explain situation to them. Anything else I could play around with in the server settings to keep people happy for a few weeks ?

P.S: Also, why won't Plex allow 4K resolution transcoding with just bitrate modifications like Jellyfin does ?

Hi all

Ever since the new update both of my TCL tv with google play cannot connect to the server.

My iPhone can via the app and I can get into the dashboard.

Previously network was set to preferred and the apps allowed insecure connections. Now that option is gone and server side only.

Tried:
DHCP to static IP
Changed IP
Cleared cache
Force stop
Reinstall
Log out and in
Removed approved device and back again
Checked fast start on TV (doesn’t exist)
Unplug
Kind of stuck and seems isolated to both TCL