Can't play ANY video on PS3 or PS4 using PLEX app

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
10

We know it’s frustrating when things don’t work as you expect them to. To try and clear up some misunderstandings here and make general notes:

  • Just because a playback capability is available for the DLNA app (or any other app), that doesn’t mean that it’s exposed to our app for us to use. That doesn’t seem very logical for many users (or even us), but it’s true nonetheless. This is a super important point.
  • Some capabilities might be exposed to our app, but extensive testing has revealed that using them results in problems (poor playback, unexpected stopping, etc., etc.). In those cases, we may intentionally not allow their use until PlayStation updates are made and further testing demonstrates that the issues have been resolved.
  • You mention running your Plex Media Server on a Synology DS115. That NAS device that uses an ARMv7 processor, which is not particularly capable of good transcoding (and has some special transcoder-related limitations), so when you do have content that needs transcoding then you might well run into issues.
  • Believe it or not, MP3 music playback support simply isn’t exposed to us at all - it just doesn’t work. M4A works and the only way we found to reliably get non-M4A formats to work is actually to transcode it in such a way that there’s basically a “hidden” (blank) video stream, too. Weird, huh? (That’s also why the error message mentions “video”, but we agree that it’s confusing in that situation.) We think the reason you’re having issues with MP3 playback may be related to the transcoder-limitations on your NAS platform and we’re investigating that.
  • As noted on our support page, the app supports H.264 levels 4.0 or lower natively. So, if your content is level 4.1, then it would need to have the video stream transcoded - regardless of whether it’s in an MP4 or MKV container.
  • You can go into Settings > Video > Maximum H.264 Level in the app and move it to 4.1 if you wish. It’s quite possible that could significantly help you out. But just be aware that it’s possible that could lead to playback issues sometimes as it notes in the setting.