I have recently purchased a new 4K TV (Hisense 65n7), which is capable of HDR 4K HEVC playback, the Plex app on the TV comes via the VEWD (Opera TV) store. My Plex server (latest version) runs on a Synology DS918+.
I have about 10 movies which are at least 4K HEVC (some are also HDR) which, when loaded onto a USB and plugged in directly, play just fine on the TV.
The problem comes when I try and play the same content via Plex. On all except one video, the server decides to transcode and the Synology hardware is not up to the task. I would have thought that, given the TV can play these files), they would Direct Play on the TV. I have made sure that the TV app has Direct Play checked but this doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I can optimise each video on the Plex server, but this is slow and makes the files MUCH larger.
I’m not really sure how to troubleshoot any further so any suggestions would be welcome!
There is nothing to troubleshoot. 4K HEVC UHD requires more GPU speed and sophistication than the Intel Celeron J3455 GPU can provide. 4K HEVC UHD decoding requires a KabyLake or higher class GPU for proper hardware decoding.
One thing you might do is
ffmpeg -i filename -c:v copy -c:a aac -ac 2 outputfilename.mp4 which will copy the video stream and minimize the audio to 2 channel stereo. This should DirectPlay. Your goal is to not give PMS any reason to decode the file for audio or video. “Read and send” is all you want
I think I may have been unclear. I am trying to stop Plex transcoding and get it to Direct Play instead as a I know that the TV is unto playing the content. Is there a way to see what is causing the Plex Server to choose transcode rather than direct play?
Will you grab the XML for what you’re trying to play? Also, can you get the specs for what the TV can accept natively?
If your media, including container (important with HEVC), is supported natively by the tv, PMS won’t need to touch it. Any time it needs remux (e.g. MKV -> MP4) things get dicey with 4K
Hover over the item.
Click “Get Info”
Click “View XML”
A new tab will open.
The top portion of that gob of test, before it gets to the descriptive parts (actors, synopsis, etc) is what I would like.
When you copy/ paste it here, before clicking ‘post comment’, you need to highlight all of it, go the the Paragraph Formatting (backwards P) and select Code formatting.
You’ll see the text indent.
Clicking ‘Preview’ will allow you to confirm it’s correct.
Code formatting prevents the forum from interpreting the XML as formatting commands (dumb forum)
Turn on debug logging, start a session where Plex decides to transcode, search for “MDE” in the server log and copy the corresponding text (that correlates to the session you just tried with). Chuck will probably need that too.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.954 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): Direct Play is disabled
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.954 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): media must be transcoded in order to use the hls protocol
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.954 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.954 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc/truehd
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.954 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc/ac3
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.955 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - The Fifth Element - video.width limitation applies: 3840 > 1920
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.955 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - MDE: The Fifth Element (1997): no remuxable profile found, so video stream will be transcoded
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.955 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - Codecs: testing h264_qsv (encoder)
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.956 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - Codecs: hardware transcoding: testing API qsv
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x32315659 -> yuv420p.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x30323449 -> unknown.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x3231564e -> nv12.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x32595559 -> yuyv422.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x59565955 -> uyvy422.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x48323234 -> yuv422p.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x58424752 -> rgb0.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.961 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x58524742 -> bgr0.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.962 [0x7f624a0d7700] DEBUG - [FFMPEG] - Format 0x30313050 -> p010le.
Nov 20, 2017 18:40:28.964 [0x7f624a0d7700] ERROR - [FFMPEG] - Error initializing an MFX session (error
That’s strange, it can definitely play 4K video, in fact if I Optimise the file using Original Quality (on the Plex server), the resulting 4K file will play fine, unfortunately it has lost HDR information and is over 100GB.
Is there a way to manually specify the capabilities of my TV?
