Sudden Bad Playbackon AS5202T

[Jayzus]

Hi All,

I've been trying to troubleshoot this for a few weeks with no success - I was running plex media server on my as5202t (+8gb ram) with no problems up until the beginning of April, before this, movie playback was fine, decent bitrate with no buffering.

Recently I've been struggling to play movie files (even on my local network) without immense amounts of buffering (like ~15 seconds of playback then 30 seconds of buffering) - I've been reading up on issues with intel drivers and have also seen people describe issues with transcoding on similar spec'd NAS devices but nobody seems to have any definitive guidance on how to fix it.

Has anyone gotten a similar experience? Or is this just one of those "wait until Asustor/Plex fix it in an update" type issue - it's frustrating given the NAS is primarily used as a home media server - at the moment it's just doing the job of a networked hard drive

[silentjay]

in the same boat. noone seems to have any urgency on the matter. i wish i cam across these issues before i dropped 500 bucks for whats basically a networked hard drive as well.

[BigErn]

I had a similar issue which I found out is caused by Intel HD driver incompatibility. I found some discussions about this on the Plex forums under the Asustor section. There is a thread with a specially configured Plex download that will correct the hardware issue or you can solve it yourself using SSH. Login to your console as admin and then go to this directory /volume1/.@plugins/AppCentral/plexmediaserver/lib/dri and type:
mv iHD_drv_video.so iHD_drv_video.bak
This will rename the Intel HD driver that is causing the problem. Plex can still get to the hardware transcoding capability using VAAPI after you do this. Then you can use the "Use hardware-accelerated video encoding" setting and it will work again the way it used to before some Plex update around Dec. 2019 caused the as yet unfixed incompatibility. Note you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade the Plex version.

[silentjay]

So basically I remove the driver file and do this with each update and hardware transcoding will work? I might try this. Thanks


EDIT: This worked for me flawlessly, thanks!!!!

[BigErn]

Glad to hear it. I don't know why there is total silence on the Asustor forums about this issue that seems to be plaguing at least all the AS5202T and AS5304T boxes. The Plex forums were a much better source of discussion on this.

[seth]

I'll give this issue a bump. I am also experiencing a video flicker when using Plex Media Player for Asustor Portal. I tried the Intel driver fix above and it didn't work for me. I don't even think my unit (AS5002T) is using hardware transcoding because that's a Plex Pass feature and I don't have that.

I don't think it's a transcoding issue for 4 reasons:

1. The audio is fine, just the video is glitchy;
2. I've tried no transcode/passthrough playback and confirmed as such on the Plex Server dashboard and I get the same problem;
3. I've seen transcoding stutter with Plex before and this issue manifests differently visually than stuttering. I don't know how to describe it, it just looks different; and
4. This is the main reason: I see the same flicker when navigating around the app without playing anything. It usually happens when moving from menu item to menu item and switching to different menu landing pages. Very weird.

Any thoughts?

[silentjay]

this is specifically a hardware transcoding problem. your issue is different.