Monday 2 April 2012

PLEX is go

So I've installed Plex Media Server (v0.9.5.3) and Media Center (v0.9.5.2) and all is working, but not perfectly.

Installation was painless and I let the server re-index all the media as I didn't feel like transferring databases and the like.

Clients running on other machines play perfectly, even insanely high datarate HD content.

However, the kids watched a movie using the client on the server itself connected to our lounge TV (via hdmi). I noticed some shudder & jitter on slow pans and zooms. When next accessing the Server Manager, I noticed 17 performance issues reported, all of which were CPU threshold related with Plex reportedly maxing out the CPU.

100% CPU usage is apparently normal when transcoding media according multiple posts on Plex forums. However, I would not expect the Plex Client to need to transcode media - unless I'm missing some codecs  on the machine.

I'll need to look into this a little more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

why not using xbmc? no transcoding need it

  said...

I've been using Plex for about a year and like it a lot (and know it!) so have no inclination to move, though I expect XMBC would do the job just as well. In any case, the issue was not related to transcoding but rather the fact I was using the onboard X3500 graphics. Changing to discrete PCIe graphics fixed the issue.