Recently decided to activate my phone for Plex Playback.
I constantly get the error message
“Error : Unable to play media”
Troubleshooting I have done is as follows
Clear cache and data.
Sign out and sign back in.
Adjust player settings, remote streaming quality 1080p 20mbps.
Turned off limit cellular data.
What I seem to be noticing is any files that are in mkv format will come up with that error message, yet if I convert the movie or tv show to MP4 it plays without any issue.
But the strange thing is when I load up Plex on the tv and hit play there’s no issue? So I’m not sure if maybe the culprit causing the issue is “HEVC MKV files”
Not sure if I’m missing a setting that needs to be enabled for HEVC to play through the android app?
Hopefully someone can shed some light on this issue very frustrating.
It could be your phone can playback mp4 files natively but not mkv, in this case Plex would try and transcode the file but it could be your Plex Server is not powerful enough to do this with it’s CPU.
If you had Plex Pass you could use hardware transcoding and your GPU (if you have one in your server).
This is a guess though.
Whats your make, model, spec for your phone & server ?
The phone is more than capable of playing back mkv before Plex I would use VLC media player to watch movies and tv shows.
I did message the support from dediseedbox and they said the CPU is a Intel Xeon E5-2650 @ 2.00GHz.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy A22
For the server they don’t have a GPU, the CPU takes forever to convert from MKV to MP4 using handbrake, yet if I convert the file on my PC it can do it in half the time, as my gaming PC is a 3600x with a 1080Ti.
Yes just checked and E5 2560 doesn’t support quick sync so couldn’t do HW transcoding anyway and suspect may be too slow for CPU based transcoding also.
Grab your server logs, post them here and hopefully a Plex support person can confirm the root cause.
