We’ve just (magically) turned on direct play support for H.265/HEVC videos in the Xbox One Plex app to gain user feedback and find any issues before fully committing to support in a future update. You will need to restart the app after making sure it’s killed by highlighting the app from the Xbox One dashboard, pressing the menu button on your controller and selecting ‘Quit’.
Direct Play support comes with a few caveats. The currently only supported container is MP4 and the audio stream codec must be either AAC or AC3. If your video file meets these criteria it should now direct play. We’re also interested to know how well the app handles 4K videos. If your video file meets all these criteria and results in an error when trying to play then please send us a sample file that can reproduce the error. Thanks!
Cool - do we need to do anything (i.e. update the xbox one app or the server, etc.) for the new settings to apply, or will it behave automatically on next open?
Unfortunately, all of my HEVC files have thus far have been mkv (generally with subtitles, which further throws a spanner in the works), but I’ll see if I can track something down to test this out ^.^
@Ithiel said:
Cool - do we need to do anything (i.e. update the xbox one app or the server, etc.) for the new settings to apply, or will it behave automatically on next open?
Ah yes, let me clarify this in the original post. You will need to restart the app after making sure it’s killed by highlighting the app from the Xbox One dashboard, pressing the menu button on your controller and selecting ‘Quit’.
So I’ve got quite a few files that meet the specification of the original post in this thread, and none of them play. When I attempt to play any of them I immediately get a “Playback Error” page on the app. I’ll try and create a sample file and send it before I go to work. They were all encoded with handbrake, and used to play through the transcoder just fine.
Yep, please send sample files our way. Also as an FYI you can playback the files as before if you disable Direct Play/Direct Stream from the app settings before playback.
Thanks to all of you for your help! Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like the Xbox One is ready for HEVC Direct Play support just yet. We may try this again in the future if we feel MS has made improvements in this area. I will be disabling HEVC support now, you may need to restart the app for the changes to take hold. Thanks again for your help and sample files.
I’ve signed a xbox up for the Preview Program, and just registered it – if there is a way to turn it on locally I’d be willing to try it again in a day or so.
@Cmtahm said:
Do you think you will be Able to direct play .mkv containers? I am doing some encoding and would like to know… I prefer mkv
MKV support has been enabled for a long time now. The bigger question will be what type of audio/video codecs are you using and with what options. Those are what will affect the direct playability at this point.
