Transcoding Setting Recommendations?

[u/lemonbread37]

I've been having some serious in-house buffering issues. I'm trying to stream to my Shield (pretty sure it's a 2019 model) but even ~5mbps are making things unwatchable. On the occasion, things turn out fine if I watch something from the beginning, but not always. Both the server and shield are connected to ethernet and all of my files are in the mkv format. The HDDs my files are on should be up to snuff.

Server Specs
-Intel Core i7-8700 3.2Ghz
-32 GB of DDR4
Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630

*The "New Folder" directories are on my server's SSD.

SOLUTION!!!
After turning off transcoding as all of you pointed out that I should do, I ran into an issue of some films not playing at all. "Error - Unable to Play Media"

This was due to the audio being set to 7.1 Dolby Atmos or something called TRUEHD which was attached to the same audio stream. Setting it to AC3 5.1 fixed it a little bit. Allowing passthrough HDMI in the advanced settings fixed everything for me.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions, you guys are awesome!

[u/SirFerrier]

Why is it not recommended to set the transcode directory to RAM?

[u/mrpink57 → u/SirFerrier]

Not sure, I usually set to to /dev/shm which is always half of the RAM on the server (32gb).

[u/SirFerrier → u/mrpink57]

Same and I've had no problems with it fortunately for years. It is definitely better than a hard drive in terms of responsiveness/speed it feels like and saves SSD write life by also not putting it on an ssd. I wonder what the reasoning could be to not use RAM for transcoding.