I am an xteve user, and on certain channels my Shield will buffer every second or so. It basically will switch immediately from buffering to playing (according to dashboard) and result in almost a slow-motion fast-forward on the device.,
If I switch to Tivimate on the Shield, still pointing to xteve, and remove plex from the equation, everything plays fine.
Furthermore, my Rokus can also play the channels fine.
EDIT: The same buffering behavior occurs on my Galaxy S7 Android phone
What information can I provide to help isolate this issue
I am also getting a big difference in playback between android and roku. Roku generally works however my android app has frequent audio issues, buffering and audio/video sync problems. I found that if I force it to transcode to a lesser quality the issues generally go away. (Not a bandwidth issue) I am thinking that maybe the android app is unable to handle the direct stream and when it transcodes it, the audio format is changed to a more compatible format. But this is just a guess at this point.
The issue with trying to determine this is I generally only have this issue when streaming IPTV. I attempted to implement ffmpeg to transcode the audio. I think the stream is HE-AACv2 Stereo but I get the same outcome when trying several other formats. Plex did seem to change the reported source audio format but not correctly, assuming that ffmpeg was doing it’s job.
After an hour or two of playing around I think I got things to work better. I forced ffmpeg to bring everything down to 720p and mp3 audio using the following command line;
The 720p is to conserve bandwidth and the audio codec eac3 worked as well, not to say others will not.
So this more or less confirms the audio format HE_AAC of the source stream is not compatible with android. I thought that Plex was supposed to sort this out?? I think some TVs will also have the same problem with this format.
I think the actual problem is that that audio stream is not compatible with Plex in some way. I don’t have problems with these dreams if I’m using Tivimate on my android box
Like you, i am using ffmpeg to convert the audio before sending to plex and it seems to have helped greatly
Can you explain what some of these switches are? Like -23 and preset faster
Some of these settings are the default in Xteve, which I am using to manage IPTV with Plex. The parameters that I changed are the following.
“scale=-1:720” -> Re-scale video to 720
“-c:a libmp3lame” -> Re-encode audio to mp3 format
“-c:v libx264” -> re-encode video using x264
“-crf 23” -> Use video quality 23 (where 0 is lossless, 23 is default, and 51 is worst possible)
“-preset faster” -> encoding speed ( ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow with medium is the default)
So, if you want to only change the audio you might want to try the following:
