Video playback was fine but super slow now

I've been running Serviio for years and it's been very solid for me streaming from my Dell laptop with an i7 5600U CPU with 16GB RAM and a wired 1Gb LAN connection. Most of my library is 1080p x.264 and it's never had a problem with it. I believe it was okay with x.265 1080p media as well. I'm running Serviio 2.3 on Windows 10. Over the past several months, I'm having problems with buffering and slow load times. I have another PC with higher specs and it's doing fine but it was never an issue with my Dell laptop which is otherwise, running fine as a daily PC for me. My transcoding settings are set to number of cores: optimal, Produce best video quality is checked and downmix audio channels is selected and all of these settings have not changed. Should I upgrade ffmpeg or is there anything else anyone can recommend to try? Thank you.

[atc98092]

There's a chance a newer version of FFMPEG might improve things. Depending on your player, it's possible that FFMPEG isn't even being used, since it's only called when transcoding is required. Audio transcoding takes very little CPU power, so I wouldn't expect your audio downmix to make a load that might cause transcoding. You could also watch your computer while a video is playing and see what your CPU load is.

My primary Serviio system only has an i5, so less power than yours and I don't have any buffering issues. My most used player is the Nvidia Shield, which has a Gigabit connector, same as my computer. But even my Roku players have never shown any buffering unless I'm testing one of my extreme bitrate test videos.