[BUG] com.google.android.exoplayer.x: Decoder init failed

Plex Players Player Betas
1

When I try to play any files that have AC3 audio the Android TV Plex app immediately throws the following error:
“Playback has stopped because the connection to the Plex Media Server has been lost. Please ensure the server is available and retry.”

All other files appear to work fine from within the Android TV app.
If I switch to the web app on the TVs inbuilt browser the file will play without issue.
I am also able to play the file through VLC and Kodi (via the PlexKodiConnect plugin).
The file also plays on my Android phone and tablet using the Plex app and the web app on Windows, Linux and Android.

EAC3 files also play without issue.
I also noticed that when playing on the TVs web browser AC3 audio is transcoded to AAC. Also EAC3 files are being transcoded to AAC when playing files through the web browser and the andriod app.

TV: Kogan Agora (Series 8 KU8000) - Android TV 5.1 - Client App Version: 6.10.0.2853-beta
Server: Debian 8 VM on ESXI host - 4vcores, 4GB Ram, 50GB HDD Server Version: 1.9.7.4460

Client App settings:
Video Quality
Adjust Automatically: Off
Home Streaming: Max
Play Smaller Videos: ON
Audio Quality
Internet Streaming: Origial
Video
Burn Subtitles: Auto
Subtitle Size: Normal
Audio Boost: None
Advanced
Passthrough: Disabled
Allow Insecure Connections: On Same Network
H264: 4.2(Recommended)
Network Logging: ON
Usage Stats: ON
Share Crash Reports: ON

2

Here is the log from the AndriodTV app showing the error. Error occurs at 11-29 18:23:45.855.
An exception occurred: com.google.android.exoplayer.j: com.google.android.exoplayer.x: Decoder init failed: OMX.MS.AC3.Decoder, MediaFormat(2, audio/ac3, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1.0, 6, 48000, eng, 1301092000, false, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1)

3

Thanks for reporting and sorry for the delay in a response. This issue should now be fixed in the new player, if you could give it a try in the latest beta. If the issue is still occurring, can you send us some new logs and we will investigate the issue.

4

Hi unfortunately this issue is still present in the new build.
I have created a sample file that will reproduce the error, it can be downloaded from here: https://1drv.ms/v/s!AqUwzrakMU-_mRU3zNs_SZOQe57Y
I have also attached my Plex Android TV application logs and the associated xml data.
Thanks for taking the time to look into this issue I really hope it can be fixed.
Cheers.

5

Thanks for the logs, when you try through Kodi can you tell if it’s using the software decoder? It sounds like your device has a bad AC3 decoder and doesn’t work.

6

I think Kodi is using it’s own bundled decoder but I’m not entirly sure on how to confirm this, looking through kodi’s logs when playing the file outputs:

18:15:30.717 T:547927561216 DEBUG: CDVDVideoCodecAndroidMediaCodec:: Multi-Surface Rendering 18:15:30.717 T:547927561216 INFO: CDVDVideoCodecAndroidMediaCodec:: Open Android MediaCodec OMX.MS.AVC.Decoder 18:15:30.718 T:547927561216 DEBUG: FactoryCodec - Video: amc-h264 - Opened 18:15:30.718 T:547927561216 DEBUG: CVideoPlayerVideo::OpenStream - open stream with codec id: 28 18:15:30.718 T:547927561216 NOTICE: Creating video thread 18:15:30.718 T:547927561216 NOTICE: Opening stream: 1 source: 256 18:15:30.719 T:547927561216 NOTICE: Finding audio codec for: 86019 18:15:30.719 T:547927561216 DEBUG: FactoryCodec - Audio: passthrough - Opening 18:15:30.719 T:547927561216 DEBUG: FactoryCodec - Audio: passthrough - Failed 18:15:30.720 T:547927561216 DEBUG: FactoryCodec - Audio: FFmpeg - Opening 18:15:30.723 T:547927561216 DEBUG: FactoryCodec - Audio: FFmpeg - Opened

I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue was being caused by some incorrectly implemented code on my device, it is a rather cheap and nasty unit. I have contacted the vendor about the problem but they have just pushed the blame back on to the app developer (no suprise there).
However it would be nice if Plex could handle the error a little more gracfully and attempt to trancode the file rather then spitting out “connection to the Plex Media Server has been lost” and giving up. Maybe adding a flag in the settings that allows forcing transcodes when direct play errors?

If I can provide any more logs or other information please let me know and I will try my best to get it for you.

7

Thanks for the logs from Kodi, they are very helpful! Looks like Kodi tries to use the built in decoder and fails and falls back to software decoder.

We should definitely be falling back to transcoding when it fails, so this is a bug. Will investigate if we can easily fallback to software decoding and save the transcode as well!