No. The logs only show an unknown failure. I was basing this bug on your description earlier. That bug would produce this error, but seeing the error does not mean it’s caused by this bug.
Right, that’s because the Shield has better codec support so it didn’t need to transcode. No transcode, no error.
Ok, I guess the last thing to try here is to do a Plex dance as we can’t pinpoint the cause of this new failure. If dancing doesn’t work, can we consider this a new bug and let the devs work on it? From the looks of it, it is only isolated to the Fire Stick.
Ok, I did the Plex Dance according to your suggestion and did see how all metadata were erased and redownloaded. It did not fix the problem. What other tests can I do to prove that this is a Fire Stick bug that is unknown as of yet?
Are you familiar with sideloading apps onto the Fire TV. There is a new experimental build at Fire Stick stops playing live tv every few minutes, exits to guide. ([FFmpeg] [ERROR] [tls @ 0x81b7e740] Error in the pull function.) which has started using a new video player. This isn’t specifically designed to address your issue, but it may help.
I have not sideloaded apps in my firestick yet but it should be an easy task. I will try that new olayer but so far the issue seems to have fixed itself for the past few days I’m playing some media. It could be another update for PMS that wen through (can’t know for sure because I have it set to auto-update always in Linux). Is that new video player coming out to beta anytime soon?
False alarm, issue is still present.
@anon18523487 do we have any updates to this issue? I haven’t tried sideloading the experimental build yet but this issue has been present 90% of the time I use my Fire Stick 4K. I had to disable subtitles by default on my Plex profile and then re-enable the subtitle right after I play the media. This way is faster than disabling the subtitle first, playing the media, and then re-enabling it back to fix the issue. Either way, it’s very annoying.
Also, I had time to look on Tautulli now and it looks like all three Fire Stick 4K’s in my other house are sometimes direct streaming media instead of direct playing them even though all media are in an MKV container! For example:
Here’s one that’s direct streamed:
And another one that’s direct played:
Do you have any ideas why this is happening for some MKV media? Both media are MKV, H264, and EAC3 so why is the other one direct streamed?
Nope. Not enough info to say. I’ll need the logs from the app when playing these to see. Possible the app tried to direct play and something failed so it reverted to direct stream. This can happen if the file’s header is bad/missing info.
@anon18523487 One of my firesticks is having playback issues again with a new show that one of my users is watching. She was trying to play Dickinson S01E06 at around 5:53PM 5/21/2021 and it just keeps on buffering that it becomes unwatchable. This is the same issue as before when I had to delete the Codecs folder in the PMS for it to get rebuilt. I did that again but didn’t really fix the issue. Here are the relevant log files:
FireStick.log (1.1 MB)
Plex Media Server.3.log (8.5 MB)
I’m trying to analyze the log files but what’s in there is really beyond me. I hope you can continue helping me here. Thanks.
Interestingly enough, I tried playing the same media by remote streaming it from another house that has the same TV and the same FireStick model and it played just fine. So for both scenarios, the only difference is the TV and the FireStick that’s doing the playback.
The logs show your user has the option in the app enabled to Automatically Adjust Quality and have chosen to show subtitles. This is the issue I mentioned to you before. Have them turn off that setting or stop using subtitles.
Ahh, I see. I am guilty with the “automatically adjust quality” setting as I was the one who set that up for them. However, I specifically asked them if they were using a subtitle for when playing that episode and they said no. I also know for a fact that all my family members that use Plex do not use subs so I’m surprised why you saw that in the logs?
If you have automatic quality adjustment disabled, what quality will the Plex client transcode to if it needs transcoding?
The Automatic Adjust is used to increase/decrease the bitrate of the video stream. For them, it will start out at the “Remote quality” set in the app, then go up or down as needed. With that setting disabled, the stream will still start at the same “remote quality” setting, it just won’t change.
The logs showed it was streaming at the original quality which was around 29 Mbps.
Well the PMS that servers the media is local to them and remote to me so should it start out with their app setting for local quality?
So if this setting is disabled, the bitrate (I have both local and remote quality set to max for all clients) won’t change but if it needs to transcode the media to a lower quality for whatever reason, what happens?
Ah sorry. Yes, the logs do show the Fire TV is local, so it will be the “Local quality” for them. The “Auto adjust” setting is specific to the client. What they set won’t affect you, what you set won’t affect them. Both of you should keep this off until the bug is addressed.
If the video needs to be transcoded it will transcode at the same quality setting the original file is. So in this case, that 29 Mbps video will get transcoded to a 29 Mbps video. If you change the quality setting, then the transcode will use whatever you set it to. So if you set it to 10 Mbps, that will convert from 29 → 10. If you have a video that is less than 10 and it needs to transcode, it will stay at it’s original value, PMS does not upscale. i.e. 8 Mbps → 8 Mbps.
Ok, got it. What if I do a remote stream and don’t have enough bandwidth for the bitrate of the media? If I have auto adjust disabled, will the playback simply fail?
If you don’t have the bandwidth either on the upstream or downstream, you will get buffering. If it is bad enough, some clients will stop and tell you that there isn’t enough bandwidth and to lower the quality manually. You can then change the quality while playing the video from the on screen menu, this will temporarily change the quality setting for that specific streaming session, and does not affect the global setting from the main app settings menu.
Ok, got it. Another playback issue though, this time from my Shield streaming off of locally from my own PMS with auto adjust disabled:
Plex Media Server.log (6.8 MB)
shield.log (4.4 MB)
I was trying to play Pitch Perfect 3 at 5/22/2021 9:51 AM and it started transcoding for some reason. The PMS does not have enough juice to transcode a 4K file but it shouldn’t transcode in the first place.
This one I played with a subtitle as I play everything with subs. Last night, it did the same and then when I started troubleshooting with you, I tried playing the same media and it just direct played so I thought it was just a temporary bug or something but I tried again today with the same failure.
I rarely have any playback issues with the Shield so I’m surprised. The connections are all Gigabit wired so this is not a bandwidth issue. I did an iperf test to check download/upload capability from the Shield to the PMS and they all average at 950Mbps.
Tried playing pitch perfect 3 again in my shield and it’s working now. So not sure why the problem is on and off?
Is that movie saved on a drive that might be going to sleep? There is a stage behavior that happens when the app doesn’t get info for the movie quickly enough because the drive is spinning up. If you quit and play again, it will play as expected.
