I fixed all of my Plex remote streaming issues with these 7 simple changes
Are you having trouble streaming movies and TV shows remotely with Plex? There are a few things to check to make sure your media server is configured correctly.
From making sure hardware transcoding is enabled (or even available on your account) to checking your download speed and turning off subtitles, here are the seven things you need to check when Plex remote streaming isn’t working the way you’d like.
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With Plex, you can keep a single, unified watchlist for any movie or TV show you hear about, on any service, even theatrical releases! You can finally stop scrolling through watchlists on all your other streaming services and add everything to Plex instead.
Hardware transcoding is not enabled or available
Hardware transcoding can be an important part of remote streaming. While a huge 4K HDR video file might be great for local playback, streaming it to your iPhone over 5G is far from desirable. So Plex will automatically transcode the video file into a more streaming-ready format.
Without hardware transcoding, your system will transcode on your computer or on your NAS processor. It’s fine if you have a high-end system and are only doing one or two transcodes, but it’s almost always better to use dedicated hardware for transcoding. It’s there hardware transcoding between.
Although it’s locked behind Plex Pass, hardware transcoding uses your system’s dedicated video processing engine to make transcoding movies and TV shows easier. This happens either on a dedicated graphics card or your CPU’s iGPU, depending on how you have it configured.
If hardware transcoding is not enabled, you need to change it to improve your remote streaming experience.
Your client is not configured for direct playback or direct streaming
If you’re in a hotel or a family member’s house and want to watch your Plex content remotely, the best way is to simply enable Direct Play. This only works well if you have a strong internet connection and a streaming media player compatible with the movie format you have on your server. If you have an Apple TV, Roku, or other modern streaming media player, you should be set up.
With direct playback, the video will stream without any transcoding, meaning your system won’t have to work hard to let you watch the movie. This is ideal if you’re using a low-power system, like a Raspberry Pi, as your Plex server.
Your Plex server is on Wi-Fi (please…no)
If your Plex server is hosted on a mini PC, Raspberry Pi, or other similar type of system, you may have chosen to connect to your network via Wi-Fi: please plug in an Ethernet cable immediately.
Wi-Fi is ideal if you are using a source device to watch content, like an Apple TV. However, Wi-Fi is not yet at the point where it can truly replace a wired connection for data-intensive tasks. Latency and throughput are simply more reliable over Ethernet.
So if you’re not using Ethernet for your Plex server, it’s time to make a change. You’ll thank me later.
Your download speed may not be fast enough
If you feel like your Plex server is struggling to keep up with streaming requests, your internet plan may simply not be fast enough. Some Xfinity Internet plans still limit download speeds to 25 Mbps or less. This is fine for normal use, but you’ll quickly reach this download speed limit when doing multiple remote streams from Plex.
That said, not having sufficient download speed isn’t always an easy solution. For example, at my parents’ house, they can’t get download speeds faster than 41 Mbps with Xfinity, even with the 1.2 Gbps plan. Meanwhile, Xfinity at Home offers a minimum of 117 Mbps download on the 300 Mbps plan, and up to 293 Mbps download on the 2 Gbps plan. I’m also fortunate to have AT&T Fiber at my home, which offers up to 5 Gbps download speeds.
If your Plex remote streaming experience is poor and you’ve already verified that your clients are set up to stream directly and your Plex server isn’t connected to Wi-Fi, it’s very likely that your internet plan simply doesn’t have sufficient download speed.
Subtitles force unnecessary transcoding
Something I never realized is that subtitles can force transcodes on your Plex server. Some people use subtitles out of habit – my parents are like that. If the subtitles are not embedded in the video itself or your client does not support the specific sidecar subtitle format you have alongside the video, Plex will transcode the subtitles into the stream.
It’s okay if you have hardware transcoding and a powerful enough system. However, if you’re using a low-power system or simply don’t have hardware transcoding capabilities, there’s a good chance that adding subtitles to your movie or TV show will force a transcoding that hampers your streaming performance.
Your Docker container does not have access to the GPU
When I first added a graphics card to my Plex server, I thought it would be as simple as plugging it in and enabling it in Plex. After all, that’s what I did when my Plex server ran Windows.
With a Plex server on Docker, or, even worse (better?), a virtual machine that runs Docker, there are a few extra steps to follow. You need to make sure that the graphics card passes through each layer correctly.
This meant I had to pass the PCIe device to my Docker VM and then to the Docker container itself. It took me a little while to set this all up, but I finally got it working properly. Intel integrated graphics can be an even bigger headache.
So if you’re just trying to get hardware transcoding to work and it’s just not working, chances are your graphics card isn’t transmitting properly to Docker.
You are trying to transcode 4K on a potato
Let’s be real, if you’re a movie buff, chances are you have a lot of 4K Blu-rays. If you have a large 4K Blu-ray collection, I assume you have spent money on a 4K Blu-ray player to rip your high-quality movies to your Plex server.
If you’re using a less powerful computer, like an old NAS, mini PC, or Raspberry Pi, and you’re trying to watch content remotely, it’s probably trying to transcode it, and you just don’t have enough power to handle it.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you have a Plex Pass with hardware transcoding support, a Raspberry Pi 3b will do it. not handle converting a high-bitrate 4K movie to 720p so you can watch it on your phone in the car. It just won’t do it.
Running a Plex server can be a lot of work. There are a lot of mistakes to be made when setting up a system, and the issues mentioned above only scratch the surface. If you want to avoid all possible problems, here are several other mistakes I made when setting up my first Plex server.
If you think a Plex server is simple to run once you get over the initial issues, think again. There are many things that no one talks about when it comes to running a Plex server. From remote access issues to storage filling up faster than expected, you need to make sure you prepare yourself from the start for the trials and tribulations of hosting your own media server.
