After the update today the Apple TV player will no longer play a ton of content that is stored on my QNAP TS-531X NAS. Prior to today’s update it had NO issue playing this content and magically the content plays just fine on my. iPad. The message it gives is:
Something went wrong playing your media. Please Try Again.
Could not play because: App cannot direct play this item. No direct play video profile exists for protocol http, with container mkv and video codec hevc. Could not transcode because: Not enough CPU for conversion of this item.
Obviously this error is bullshit since earlier today it had NO problem playing back the content prior to your updating of the Apple TV application. This is also borne out by the fact that ALL of my other devices running your other apps like iOS will play this same content just fine.
How can I roll back the AppleTV app so that I can get rid of this garbage app downgrade?
I too have encountered this problem with the old player on version 7.28 of the Player. This is problematic because the old player supports spatial audio for AirPods.
I’m running version 1.25.5.5492 of the server on a Synology DS218j which lacks oomph to transcode, but has happily direct played everything I’ve thrown at it… until now…
The new player still supports direct play, but does not support spatial audio.
Same, since yesterdays update 4K content seems to be totally broken. I generally use the old player. If I turn that off, content plays, but the god awful audio out of sync issue still exists.
I think I have a similar problem… While I could still play 4K HEVC content, the problem rests on 4K DV content.
A few days ago I was playing MP4 DV files without problem, but now when I try to play them I see only a spinning wheel. But Plex shows that it’s on Direct Play, and there is no transcoding. Also the sound actually plays but not the video.
There are no playback tools ( time indicator, play/pause button etc ) visible at the bottom though…
Android TV and LG WebOS apps still can play them without any problem. But I don’t have a DV capable Shield TV ( I have the old version ) and LG app cannot play PGS subtitles without transcoding the video, which results in a horrendous picture.
I think I’m seeing version of this. MKV HEVC files that were direct playing previously now transcode unnecessarily in 7.28.1. Trying to force them to direct play via editing Resources/Profiles/tvOS.xml just makes them fail to play at all.
I’m using an older version of PMS (1.19.1.2645), but as I said all was well until the app updated recently.
Edit: ffprobe of a video that is not playing any more:
I have had a lot of problems playing my NAS Plex server content on Apple TV. Have fiber: 350Mbps connection.
Currently I have Apple TV gen. 6 - 4K.
I received a tip on reddit that fixed my problems: I installed the Infuse app, logged in to my Plex account - Voila! Everything is running smoothly.
Yesterday I experienced problems playing 4K MKV content on my Apple TV 4K.
No 4K material would play. All other worked fine.
The Apple TV 4K is on tvOS 15.3.
When I tried on my other Apple TV 4K device, it would play all 4K materials just fine.
THAT Apple TV 4K is on tvOS 15.2.
So my conclusion is that the latest tvOS version (15.3) has a bug that affects Plex.
+1
I was really surprised when it suddenly stopped working today. I’ve been using the old player for over a year now since it has no HomePod lip sync issues. I guess Plex doesn’t consider the old player a priority and didn’t notice this huge regression?
For those stuck who want a temporary fix, you can sign up for their test builds https://testflight.apple.com/join/MY6JTzix and install v7.27. v7.29 doesn’t contain a fix.
I am not that technical enough to understand all the details but I am at a loss as to why updates are released that break things that were working fine. I moved to Apple TV because I hoped I wouldn’t have to worry about this nonsense, but it almost feels worse now. Today most of my 4k content won’t even play anymore (using old player to avoid the awful audio sync issue) but now this appears broken. Either get black screen, or those that do work are no longer in HDR. No idea if this is Apple or Plex or both, but weird how every other video app works just fine. Really fed up and at the point of giving up on Plex all together.
+1, I am experiencing the same problem. I tried to play a 4k HEVC video and received this error message from my Apple TV 4k: “Something went wrong playing your media. Please try again.” and just below it, “Could not direct play because: App cannot direct play this item. No direct play video profile exists for protocol http, with container mkv, and video codec hevc. Could not transcode because: File is unplayable. Color space is not supported.”
I’m using the latest Plex Apple TV app, along with PMS 1.25.5.5492 running via docker on a Synology RS820+. Playback is local through my LAN. I have the Plex app set to play at the maximum quality and have Direct Play enabled.
“Use old player” is a checkbox in the Plex app settings. Scroll down a fair way. I’m not sure if I changed that from the default a long time ago or not, but worth trying.
@mike_b_scenefilms_com could you add the tag “apple-tv-beta” to this post, it might give the devs better visibility of this?
The issue is the working version on TestFlight will expire in 34 days so I hope they fix this before then.
Second concern is they’re about to drop support for tvOS 13 and I hope they fix this regression before leaving tvOS 13 users with a broken player (though those users could always update their OS haha).
