[ANDROID TV] Some video doesn't start using Plex App

General Discussions
1

Hello,

After all my problem to read video fluid (without framerate problem) I get something working well, using 1920*1080@60p as my base Android TV setup.

But now, some videos doesn’t start :/… and I seriously don’t understand why.
When I try to play it, it show me the loader turning around… again… and again… and it never stop to load.
I can play those video via Plex fo Kodi or Plex from (but using those app, the play still have framerate issues).

If it can help, here is the informations about one of the failing videos :

Media
Video Resolution 1080p
Duration 2:06:13
Bitrate 5025 kbps
Width 1920
Height 1080
Aspect Ratio 1.78
Container MKV
Video Frame Rate 24p
Audio Profile dts
Video Profile high
Part
Duration 2:06:13
File King.Arthur.Legend.of.the.Sword.2017.Truefrench.1080p.HDLight.DTS.H264-Xantar.mkv
Size 4.43 GB
Audio Profile dts
Container MKV
Video Profile high
Codec H264
Bitrate 3489 kbps
Language English
Bit Depth 8
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Height 1080
Level 4.1
Profile high
Ref Frames 4
Scan Type progressive
Title 1080p
Width 1920
Codec DCA
Channels 5.1
Bitrate 1536 kbps
Language Français
Audio Channel Layout 5.1(side)
Profile dts
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
Title VFF DTS 5.1 @1509 kbps
Forced true
Codec SRT
Language Français
Title SRT Forcés
Codec SRT
Language Français
Title SRT Complets
Codec PGS
Language Français
Header Compression 1
Title PGS Forcés
Codec PGS
Bitrate 20 kbps
Language Français
Header Compression 1
Title PGS Complets
Codec PGS
Bitrate 29 kbps
Language English
Header Compression 1
Title PGS Complets
2

The only thing I can notice that is diferent with the working video is “Bitrate 5025 kbps”.
Video with higher or lower bitrate work well (sometime with load time, but it never take more than 10s to start playing well).

3

No idea about it ?

4

you should activate the “show information” option on your client to get information how the video is being played back. coming from my own experience, you’ve got 2 factors which might impact the Android TV Plex Client:

  1. DTS audio: while enabled on many devices, either Android isn’t telling Plex or Plex won’t recognize/appreciate the information, resulting in DTS being transcoded – not a big issue, audio transcoding shouldn’t eat up much of your server CPU
  2. PGS subtitle: again… communication thing between OS and client. Even if your TV could deal with PGS, Plex keeps not recognizing it and will burn the subtitles into the video (in your case even without activating any subtitles, as yours are “forced”). Burning in subtitles means the Plex server will transcode the video to merge the actual video and the subtitle images

Even if your server is strong enough, this transcoding might take a moment to get things buffered.