[mths]

On that note, what kind of hardware/connection does that require? I run Plex on a rather old Synology NAS at home, and it's great for streaming at home at original quality even up to 4K but can get a bit sluggish when it tries to scale the video one way or another.

Then I go out of my home and it's unwatchable when streaming even original quality, which is odd because I have 20Mbit up with fiber to the premise at home and probably getting 60Mbit+ where I'm trying to watch from.

That's mostly 1080p I've been trying to watch, so 10Mbit should be sufficient. I don't know why the hardware would become a problem only when I leave home.

[paranoidrobot]

It'll be the transcoding that is the issue. Whether that is because you don't have a direct path, bandwidth issues, or because of codec issues.

Not all devices support all codecs. Any disagreement means that Plex is now going to try transcoding, even if the hardware capability isn't there (and most NASs don't have the grunt to do it).

You have options.

Spend more disk space: You can tell Plex to transcode copies into lower bitrate versions it makes them available via the UI (although this isn't always obvious how, and varies on platform). Note that on a NAS this might take a day to transcode a movie. During which your ability to use the NAS for anything else is greatly reduced.

Spend more effort: Re-rip or re-encode everything into a known supported format. You will need to maintain this. Tools like Tdarr may help here.

More compute power (and some effort):

If your content is in 1080p and you want to view it in 1080p or lower then reasonably-modern Intel CPUs with support for QuickSync are pretty good at handling transcoding for 1080p. Plex Media server has an option to enable hardware-accellerated transcoding if you pay for Plex.

An older Intel NUC or Small-form-factor PC can usually do this job fine. They can also be fairly power efficient.

If you want to start throwing in 4k content, then you are going to need a GPU and the cost and complexity goes up.

[whiteandnerdy]

I have a vague memory that if your device can't get a direct route to your Plex server (e.g. because of NAT) then it gets relayed via Plex's own cloud servers with significant bandwidth throttling.

This article seems to have some more details and mentions that free tier users get throttled to 1Mbps. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-serve...

[surge]

I had a friend who had DSL cause it was all they had available, and with 1.5Mbps up I could decently stream a lot of things at 720p which TBH was fine and I did not notice, plus a lot of the source material was older shows like Stargate SG-1 so resolution wasn't that high anyway.

[bsagdiyev]

I use my old GTX1060 for transcoding and it does a decent job. Upload speed could be another factor, as well as pointed out elsewhere making sure there is direct internet access to the Plex server so it doesn't use a middle server via Plex themselves.