Plex organizes your video, music, and photo collections and streams them to all of your screens. Plex is now available on PS4, Xbox One, Apple TV 4, Roku, HD TV, Tivo, etc. You also can install Plex on your NAS to make your home theater more wonderful. <Read NAS compatible list>. Plex can transcode nearly all video files to make you stream video on TV. But Plex still has flaws, Plex can’t play Blu-ray/DVD, Plex stutters while playing MKV, Plex doesn’t play ISO, Plex transcodes “down” 4K to 1080p on Vizio TV, etc.
Plex is not powerful enough to deal with anything you throw at it. Throughout Plex forum and Reddit, questions about video playback with Plex are asked all the time. Here let’s list the FAQ on Plex and collect the best solution to Plex video playback problems.
Question 1: “I just installed the PLEX app on my ATV4! Very excited. I’m trying to convert all my blurays to digital files I can access easily.” – from macrumors.com
Ripping and backing up Blu-ray to Plex gives you the access to Blu-ray movies on Apple TV 4 without using discs and heavy Blu-ray player. You don’t worry about the scratch and damage on the discs any longer.
Professional Guide: Rip Blu-Ray To Plex Server To Set Up Home Theater
Question 2: “I am very much a beginner so any help would be greatly appreciated. My overall goal is to be able to rip my DVDs and not lose any quality and to maintain the menu structure on both. Storage is not a problem at all” – from forums.plex.tv
Circumventing copy protection and shift format won’t satisfy people nowadays. They want the original video quality. So how to rip DVD to Plex without qulality loss and stream DVD movies with Plex on ATV, PS3/PS4, Roku?
Related Guides:
How To Play DVD On Apple TV 4 Via Plex Channel?
Backup DVD To Plex For Watching On Tablet/Laptop/Mobile
Question 3: “I have a question – i have a full bluray movie in the format of an ISO file. it’s about 45 Giga in size. Is there any way PMS can play the movie? i don’t mind if there will be no menus and ect. just playing the movie itself and enjoy the full resolution the bluray offers ” – from forums.plex.tv
Files such as ISO or IMG and folder structures such as VIDEO_TS or BDMV are generally referred to as “disk image” formats because they’re basically “cloning” the structure and content from a DVD or Blu-Ray optical disc. Such formats are not supported in Plex. Since these disk image formats aren’t supported, if you want to play ISO with Plex, we recommend that you convert such content into more common and compatible media formats.
Tutorial:
Rip a DVD ISO to MKV for streaming via Plex with multi audio tracks
Play Blu-ray/DVD ISO on Apple TV 3 through Plex server
Question 4: “With the recent introduction of Chromecast for Plex to the general public, I want to play a show I downloaded online which is in .mkv format. The thing is, the mkv file does not show up on my dashboard/tablet app. The mp4 files I currently have show up with no problem. What are the steps I need to take for the mkv files to show up on the list? ” – from forums.plex.tv
I have noticed very rarely plex just doesn’t recognize files. It’s probably just the way it is encoded. You can try to fix this issue by renaming the file with only the movie title since maybe the whole file names are not being recognized by Plex. For example, if your mkv videos are all Sports videos so the names were kind of random. To solve it, you should set your ‘Scanner’ as ‘Personal Video Files Scanner’ and ‘Agent’ as ‘Personal Media’. Plex picks up pretty much any file with that setting.
If the problem is caused by the MKV codec (MKV is a container that maybe contain many different codecs), you can try to convert MKV to MP4 for Plex.
MKV to Plex guide: Convert MKV to Plex Media Server with Suitable format
Question 5: “ I have ever downloaded some TV shows from TiVo and want to stream them via Plex for playback? Looking for a software program that will convert TiVo shows to Plex Media Server compatible file type ” – from reddit
Plex comes to TiVo on June 8th 2015 to makes it possible to stream your own media, and a lot of other content, to your TiVo device. But if you do need to convert your downloaded Tivo videos to Plex, I also can give you a detailed guide.
Read here: Plex Tivo Shows Workaround – Importing Tivo files to Plex
Question 6: “I finally sorted out all my media on the weekend and I’m running Plex to be able to watch my stuff on my Samsung TV using smart hub. I really have no idea in terms of the tech side of running media servers, and can only assume I have something wrong in the settings. MP4 and MKV files work perfectly, but avi will not play.” – from forums.plex.tv
Plex supports mpeg4, msmpeg4, mjpeg AVI. If your AVI is not encoded with this codec, your Plex won’t play it.
Read: Can I get AVI working with Plex to watch on my Samsung TV?
Question 7: “ I want to be able to download a movie (from iTunes or other place) on my PC and then connect it to my Sony Bravia TV via Plex Media Server (I have the cables) to watch on the bigger screen rather than the 13″ screen. iTunes tells me that I can only watch it one device at a time. Is there a way around this. Is another rental place better. Do I need to have the apple TV box instead of Plex or similar? Thanks.” – from forums.plex.tv
It’s impossible to watch the iTunes movies/TV shows on Sony TV directly. We have to use an Apple TV or get rid of the annoying iTunes DRM protection.
Related Guide: Play iTunes Purchased/Rented Movie/TV Show on Sony Bravia TV via Plex
Question 8: “Now that I’m set up I want to start ripping my personal collection of DVDs. I am planning on using Handbrake unless otherwise told. What settings in Handbrake will yield the best results for my DVDs to be view on my TV via a Samsung Blu-Ray player? I can use either AllShare or the Plex client.” – from forums.plex.tv
Professional guide: Best Settings for Handbrake video converting to play in Plex
Question 9: Want to play BDMV folder? Read Play BDMV folder on HTPC via Plex Media Server
Question 10: Don’t know clearly what formats Plex support after all? Read What Media Formats are Supported by Plex Media Server and How to Use It?
Question 11: First use Plex so don’t know how to add movies to Plex library. Read Add Movies to Plex to Make Your Media Experience Easy and Enjoyable
Learn >> Other Plex Problems and Solutions
Read More Plex Guides:
- How to Rip TV Series DVD to Episodes for Plex?
- Get SRT Subtitle File from Blu-ray for Plex Media Server
- Backup Blu-ray to ReadyNAS Pro 6 for Plex
- How to Backup Blu-ray Movies to unRaid Server for Playing on Tablet via Plex?
- Get 3D Blu-ray (MVC) onto Plex for Perfect Streaming in Panasonic VT65
Pavtube New Official Site
