New to using Plex. Had been using Mezzmo for years.
Recently had to make some unexpected changes with a hard drive that had to be fresh loaded windows 11. Trying to re-create everything including my media server. Thought I would try to look at an alternate and Plex comes up time and time again.
I realize when you’re dealing with technology, there’s so much out there. I can’t imagine to be the software people writing this stuff when there are so many different clients and the number of codecs you have to keep in mind.
Anyway, to get to my question. Noticed that some of my iPhone created movies are wanting to play sideways on fire stick. Also noticed using my LG TV they play upright but no audio. Try to find a work around reading all over the Internet and this forum and I see many people bring up the subject, but then there is nothing commented in most cases and if anything three months, it says it’s closed. With Mezzmo, I would have a question and have some communication with someone from Mezzmo within one to two days and I must say that I learned a lot from those people and they stayed with me until stuff was fixed. I’m just curious if all these number of people that have the same problem as I do ever got this problem fixed and if they did, why is it not out there for everyone that’s continuing to have the problem or coming about new having the problem.
The reason I’m asking this is because I’m trying to decide whether I want to stick it out with Plex early in this process or just go to a different process altogether. All the fancy looks, and all that mean nothing to me if you can’t get something done.
Phones usually record videos in a hard set orientation (based on the camera’s physical orientation) – the rotation is added as a tag in the file.
It appears the Android TV (FireTV) clients of Plex don’t recognize that tag and will therefore show the videos in the raw orientation. The known workaround is to force the client to transcode the video (e.g. by setting a specific playback quality different from the original) – that way, the app will ask your server for an optimized version… and while doing the optimization, the rotation will be “corrected” and applied to the video itself (not just as a tag).
Not sure about the LG TV.
Sounds like there might be an issue with the specific format used by your iPhone when recording the audio. The Plex apps will usually check with the machine if a format is natively supported – and if the machine doesn’t reject it, the Plex app will try to stream the audio track as-is. Sometimes, there’s many different flavors to a format – and your device might support some but not that specific one.
You might want to check out the file using MediaInfo or investigate the technical details listed for that video/audio in the Plex web app. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201998867-investigate-media-information-and-formats/
I appreciate the feedback. It makes sense to me somewhat. I consider myself a novice with all the programming details but realistically the market for these types of things (ie servers, clients,etc) are to the masses and not just videographers or people who do this for a living. People gravitate here who are everyday people sold on the idea of what this can do for them not realizing they are going to have to do some work to make it a reality.
Luckily most of my most meaningful videos were recorded with something other than an iphone. But reality is, most people are taking the easy approach these days and recording in the moment and not carrying around a camcorder like the old days. With that said congruent to the above, most people will have a number of videos created using an ios device. They will not know this going into it this is a loaded topic.
The more I read, the more I was getting into details I had little knowledge of and truthfully don’t care to have to know. Would be nice if the programmers on their end could find a string that fixes this in some way universally.
That being said, I like what Plex has to offer when it comes to features, the look of it, etc. Also, it seems to be the most widely used and still viable. That says to me that someone is still programming on their end and one day they may fix the issue. Until then, I’ll use multiple clients for different videos when wanting to view.
