So, I have had a Samsung TV for a while and used my fire TV 4k box and never had an issue streaming 4K from my VPS or Plex Cloud.
Decided to treat myself to a 65" Sony Android HDR TV so I could rid of all the extra remotes and boxes and have 1 simple system. However, whenever I play 4K the margin bars go grey and I get nothing but green lines.
I thought, ok, not a problem, I’ll install Kodi and use the Plex add-on which I know 100% works and I’ve never had an issue. The movie plays and about minutes later it randomly stops. It doesn’t buffer etc just stops and gives me a replay option.
It’s extremely frustrating as my in-laws have a slightly older sony android and it works fine for them. I’ve deleted the apps, reinstalled, cleared data and cahce. Fire TV as far as I am aware is android based so what gives? 4K content is increasing massively and unless I go to my spare bedroom on and use my old TV I can’t watch anything in 4K.
Everything is wired in. I have around 80mbps, speed test on the TV hits that easily.
The fire TV box is wireless and doesn’t have an issue.
Incredibly frustrating.
I wouldn’t mind if the Kodi add-on worked but it doesn’t.
I’ve a 55" Sony A1, and streaming from PLEX to it using the native PLEX app has been pretty flawless.
What I don’t have is any 4K on the PLEX server… is it just 4K content that you get grey bars on? if so whats the file format and codecs used ?
Another thing ive noticed with this plex problem is that
x265 files have the grey bars
h265 files have black bars
mediainfo says the h265 files have a aspect ratio of 16:9 but the films have black bars so are actually 21:9.
maybe the black bars are burned in as part of the file on h265 but not x265 ?
the x265 files in mediainfo say they are 21:9 and when played in plex on my xe9305 have the grey bars.
very strange. hopefully an easy fix for some1 at plex.
I haven’t had this issue, but I am frustrated that the built in Plex app on the Sony X900E doesn’t bitstream audio correctly through the optical port on the TV. I have to watch everything through Kodi with the Plex add on to get proper bitstreaming of Dolby Digital. Android TV on the Sony is very frustrating compared to how well it works on the Nvidia Shield TV.
Same problem here with grey bars on X900E with 4k HDR source and Plex client.
If I put the media onto a USB stick and plug it directly into the TV it plays fine with the Videos app. The interesting thing with this video is that the black bars are in the source encoding - the decoded frames are 16:9, but the movie is 21:9. The bars look black when I play the source on Mac or Windows.
