When I start playing Red Notice, it tries to direct play everything, but it stutters, and eventually freezes, and then the streams get transcoded as shown above. This is with subtitles off. If subtitles are on, then whether it tries to burn it or not, playback freezes every few seconds (but the transcode session looks similar).
I’ve attached the logs for Red Notice. Red Notice.log (293.6 KB)
I didn’t save the logs for Harry Potter when it direct played, but I just tried again and it now has the same situation as Red Notice:
I don’t have those files anymore, but the same thing happened on a different file that I put below.
It seems like there are actually 2 issues:
The crazy high bitrate as described above
If I force nvenc/nvdec by using HardwareDevicePath="/dev/dri/renderD129" in Preferences.xml then the media is direct played, which causes the ccwgtv to freeze every second (I’m assuming because the TV is not HDR, and playing back HDR content is causing issues). If I then force subtitles to be burned, it reverts to the behavior from #1
<MediaContainer size="1" allowSync="1" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.library" librarySectionID="2" librarySectionTitle="TV Shows" librarySectionUUID="93945e1b-ced2-4936-a382-b4da580fdca0" mediaTagPrefix="/system/bundle/media/flags/" mediaTagVersion="1663263195">
<Video ratingKey="66753" key="/library/metadata/66753" parentRatingKey="66736" grandparentRatingKey="66735" guid="plex://episode/622f595ff395de75897a1ab5" parentGuid="plex://season/606ee67a38270f002c06cbcf" grandparentGuid="plex://show/5d9c09154eefaa001f5e7cd2" type="episode" title="Adrift" grandparentKey="/library/metadata/66735" parentKey="/library/metadata/66736" librarySectionTitle="TV Shows" librarySectionID="2" librarySectionKey="/library/sections/2" grandparentTitle="The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" parentTitle="Season 1" contentRating="TV-14" summary="Galadriel finds a new ally; Elrond faces a cold reception from an old friend; Nori endeavors to help a Stranger; Arondir searches for answers while Bronwyn warns her people of a threat." index="2" parentIndex="1" audienceRating="6.4" viewCount="1" skipCount="1" lastViewedAt="1663316824" thumb="/library/metadata/66753/thumb/1663332459" art="/library/metadata/66735/art/1662110922" parentThumb="/library/metadata/66736/thumb/1662110922" grandparentThumb="/library/metadata/66735/thumb/1662110922" grandparentArt="/library/metadata/66735/art/1662110922" duration="4022443" originallyAvailableAt="2022-09-01" addedAt="1662122366" updatedAt="1663332459" audienceRatingImage="themoviedb://image.rating" chapterSource="media">
<Media id="99699" duration="4022443" bitrate="1899" width="3840" height="1600" aspectRatio="2.35" audioChannels="6" audioCodec="aac" videoCodec="hevc" videoResolution="4k" container="mkv" videoFrameRate="24p" audioProfile="lc" videoProfile="main 10">
<Part accessible="1" exists="1" id="124468" key="/library/parts/124468/1662122361/file.mkv" duration="4022443" file="/disks/storage/plex_tv/The Lord Of The Rings The Rings Of Power/Season 1/The.Lord.of.the.Rings.The.Rings.of.Power.S01E02.Adrift.2160p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.HDR.H.265-NTb.x265.fdk.mkv" size="954964625" audioProfile="lc" container="mkv" deepAnalysisVersion="6" requiredBandwidths="7877,6481,5122,4366,4366,4366,4366,4366" videoProfile="main 10">
<Stream id="299534" streamType="1" default="1" codec="hevc" index="0" bitrate="1899" bitDepth="10" chromaLocation="left" chromaSubsampling="4:2:0" codedHeight="1600" codedWidth="3840" colorPrimaries="bt2020" colorRange="tv" colorSpace="bt2020nc" colorTrc="smpte2084" frameRate="24.000" height="1600" level="150" profile="main 10" refFrames="1" requiredBandwidths="7387,5992,4633,3892,3892,3892,3892,3892" scanType="progressive" width="3840" displayTitle="4K HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)" extendedDisplayTitle="4K HDR10 (HEVC Main 10)"> </Stream>
<Stream id="299537" streamType="2" selected="1" default="1" codec="aac" index="3" channels="6" bitrate="576" language="English" languageTag="en" languageCode="eng" audioChannelLayout="5.1" profile="lc" requiredBandwidths="489,489,489,489,489,489,489,489" samplingRate="48000" displayTitle="English (AAC 5.1)" extendedDisplayTitle="English (AAC 5.1)"> </Stream>
<Stream id="299535" streamType="3" selected="1" default="1" codec="srt" index="1" bitrate="0" language="English" languageTag="en" languageCode="eng" requiredBandwidths="1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1" displayTitle="English (SRT)" extendedDisplayTitle="English (SRT)"> </Stream>
<Stream id="299536" streamType="3" codec="srt" index="2" bitrate="0" language="English" languageTag="en" languageCode="eng" requiredBandwidths="1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1" title="SDH" displayTitle="English (SRT)" extendedDisplayTitle="SDH (English SRT)"> </Stream>
</Part>
</Media>
</Video>
</MediaContainer>
Two people are watching that same video with different settings on different players so it gets very confusing.
I removed HardwareDevicePath="/dev/dri/renderD129" so I could test all the different scenarios.
What I could get from the log is that it’s getting a -1 error from VAAPI (still not sure what’s going on there; possibly a device issue because intel_gpu_top isn’t finding any iGPU either) and falling back to nvenc/nvdec.
If I leave everything as is (quality set to original, no subtitles) then it tries to direct play, which causes the freezing every second. Sometimes after a few seconds it transcodes x265 4K HDR → x264 4K SDR, and then it works fine, but sometimes it doesn’t and just keeps freezing.
In the scenario where it starts transcoding, if I turn on subtitles it burns them (even though my setting is to only burn subtitles for image formats), has a high bitrate, and buffers every ~30 seconds.
In the scenario where it freezes every second without subtitles, if I try to change the quality for that session to something other than original (and I can only choose 560p or lower; no 4k, 1080, or 720 options), the stream immediately ends, and the file is marked as having been watched.
If I change the player’s quality settings to 20mpbs then it transcodes, but everything works fine with a higher bitrate, but not as high as before.
I’ll get the logs for each of these scenarios ASAP (likely Sat night or Sunday).
Sorry for the delay. Something odd is going on when you play videos at original quality. For some odd reason the app is requesting a really high bitrate from PMS. i.e. it’s upscaling the video. But it’s picking a really high bitrate so your server is having issues keeping up. I can’t recreate the issue. My guess is there is something odd with the way your videos are being encoded so that PMS can’t analyze it properly. When it needs to transcode, it just ends up picking a high value to ensure it’s not losing any quality.
Do you have a smallish file (<1GB) that causes this issue so I can pass it along to the devs to look at?
