Hi all,
I googled already a lot and found some posts but I did not find my answer there. I hope you guys can help me out. I have a mac mini mid 2010 running El Capitan. It has a 2.4 Ghz Intel core 2 Duo processor, a new SSD disk and 8 GB of memory. I use this mac mini only as a server, it contains mac OS X Server where I only use the services "Caching, File Sharing (a Drobo is connected to this mac mini), profile manager, time machine, and VPN server.
Besides server I run sabnzbd (which most of the time is not doing anything since I own netflix) and plex server. Until some time ago I used this server a lot to stream all my movies, including movies created by myself (about my children) which are 1080p movies.
Some time ago, I noticed that the playback on iOS devices of 1080P movies was not possible anymore, it pauzes each few minutes to buffer before it continues to play. I hoped that the problem was related to airplay so when my new Apple TV 4 came in with the Plex app installed I was really hoping to see a difference which wasn't the case.
What I have seen is that playback from Apple TV 4, iPhone 6 and iPad Air all doesn't work, when I check the server while the movie is playing I see that the "Plex New Transcoder" takes my CPU usage up to 100%, so that seems to be the reason.
However, when I play the same movie through VLC on my mac mini it self OR if I use my macbook pro and play the movie through Plex on the Web URL of Plex it all works fine and almost no CPU at all is used on my mac mini.
I know my Mac mini is getting older, but it doesn't have to be a fast machine for me since it only is working background tasks for me. However, I am willing to replace the Mac mini if the specs are just not enough, however, according to the Plex website it should be just enough. And I also don't understand why I have no problems at all when not playing the movie through an iOS like device (such as remote mac or directly on the mac mini itself).
Can anybody let me know if it really only is insufficient specs or that I can try something else first as well? And if is the specs, can anybody then explain a little bit why the same problem does not occur through the web browser playback or directly on my mac mini through e.g. VLC?
Kind Regards,
Nico van der Linden