SOLVED RPi 4 Plex server performance tuning

[freakdiablo]

Ok...throwing this out there. Between setting up Plex, the external drive, Samba, and my router, I've lost close to two weeks worth of evenings trying to get to this point. The only friends I made along the way will get me committed if I talk to them in public, so there goes the only benefit to this...enlightening experience.

So I have a Raspberry Pi 4 - the 4GB variant, got it in September if they made any newer revisions since then. Finally got it up and running as a Plex server. Loaded it up with a bunch of Bluray rips and just tried playing one through a web browser on my laptop, got hit with a "Not enough CPU for conversion of this item." error.

The Blurays are all ripped to h.265 in mkv containers. Tried this while on the same network. The Pi is running Raspbian Lite, and it looks like nothing of any considerable load is running on the Pi. I tried setting Plex both with the "Disable video stream encoding" setting checked and unchecked, and have Transcoder quality set to "Prefer higher speed encoding". Considering the end game here is to get them playing on several 45-50" smart TVs I don't want to go downscaling them to 480p or anything like that.

Any other settings I should try? Should I try different file encodings on the videos? Should I find out if Raspberry Pis mix well with Two Roads? Because that's next on the list...

 

[Janus67]

Make sure the device you are playing on has the codecs/ability to direct play the file and such. If it can do that then no transcoding is needed on the server.

Also hardwire everything if possible.

 

[freakdiablo]

Wow and I am a Moron with a capital Q.

Turns out with my laptop, something about the Plex web player isn't meshing with the KLite codec pack. So it was leaving it up to the Pi to transcode to whatever stream the web player can handle.

Tried my LG smart TV earlier today, a little buffering here and there but that's just as likely a wifi range issue as it's several rooms away from the router and a lower end TV - doubt it has the best radio in it. Just now downloaded the standalone Plex Windows program and it seems to be working fine.

In both cases the Plex processes are only putting a 10-15% combined load on the Pi.