Direct Playback issue on Pixel 7 Pro

Plex Players Mobile Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.32.5.7349
Player Version#: 9.29.1.3463 and tried the 9.30.0.3478 beta aswell.
plexdebug.txt (349 KB)

So I have playback issues on my new Pixel 7 Pro in the Android app. I’m only interested in direct playback since my plex is running on a Raspberry Pi 4. Some videos are not able to be played, and I can’t figure out why. I have issues with both h264 and HEVC files, but not all. Some from both play just fine with direct play. Some just dont start. And throw me different errors.
At first it was “An error occurred while attempting to play this video. Please check your connection and try again”
Later i started to encounter “Unable to Play Media”
And now a lot of “the server is not powerful enough to convert the video” Sometime regardless if i have transcoding disabled completely.
I attached a log while i tried to cycle through playing a few files, both HEVC and h264, some work, others dont, and i dont understand why. I’m pretty sure the Pixel 7 Pro has all the hw decoders needed for both, and i guess non of the HEVC and H264 files should be able to play if it didnt.

Can anyone help me out? This is breaking me down, since it worked fine on my ancient Huawei P20 Pro, and it still does.

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2

If you have it video transcoding disabled and it thinks the item needs to be transcoded then it will show the same message as if the server just could not.

It looks like the server thinks it is ok to direct play an episode of the Rings of Power

For the the episode of Foundation it looks like it thinks it needs to transcode due to subtitles. How are your burn subtitles settings configured?

Likely need to see the android logs as well to figure out what it is going on

3

Thank you so much for getting back to me. I attached a screenshot of my android subtitle settings, I assume that’s what you meant. And a log from the app after opening one video that plays and two that don’t.
The screenshot is in hungarian(i couldnt find quickly how to change the language on the app). But it should be pretty straight forward
Subtitle embed is set to automatic
Size is Normal
Color is White
Background is unchecked
Position is low
And style overwrite is unchecked

Screenshot_20230823-175253
Screenshot_20230823-175253480×1041 17.8 KB

plex-log-wow438.zip (263.5 KB)
Please let me know if i can provide anything else you might need. I’d really like to fix this.

4

can you please try changing

Subtitle embed to ONly Advanced formats

and in Settings>Quality disable “auto adjust quality”

and see if you get the same issue

5

Unfortunatelly it didnt work either.
Settings>Quality disable “auto adjust quality” was not enabled before. And i Tried with only Advanced formats aswell.
Heres the log
plex-log-wow438 (1).zip (763.2 KB)

Also after you mentioned the subtitles, i tried stripping it from an offending file to see if that works, but it didn’t.

Edit:
I run through the logs, is this not where it fails?

08-24 19:51:52.646  e: [ExoPlayer][MediaCodecAudioRenderer] Audio codec error
  android.media.MediaCodec$CodecException: Error 0xe

08-24 19:51:52.646  e: [ExoPlayer][ExoPlayerImplInternal] Playback error
  androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlaybackException: MediaCodecAudioRenderer error, index=3, format=Format(1, null, null, audio/eac3, eac3, -1, angol, [-1, -1, -1.0, null], [6, 48000]), format_supported=YES
      at androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlayerImplInternal.handleMessage(SourceFile:370)
      at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:102)
      at android.os.Looper.loopOnce(Looper.java:205)
      at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:294)
      at android.os.HandlerThread.run(HandlerThread.java:67)
  Caused by: androidx.media3.exoplayer.mediacodec.MediaCodecDecoderException: Decoder failed: c2.dolby.eac3.decoder

I just realised it might be relevant, I’m on Android 14 UPB5.230623.005.
Edit2: We run some rounds on discord, and we might have narrowed it down, to files that are E-AC-3 JOC, So Dolby Atmos. And according to some searches, google cheaped out and didnt get Dolby Atmos Licences for the Pixels… I guess VLC just fixes this somehow, but Exoplayer can’t? And thats where i run into the issue with my Direct Play setup.

But shouldn’t plex be transcoding audio anyway(even on my Pi4?), why didn’t it? Now I think i have a new problem, where when i disabled video transcode, (which as it turns out was never the culprit), it should still have transcoded the audio, but it never did, and that is why it was failing all this time no matter what i was trying. Why could that be?

Solution: So after many hours, i managed to fix it, so it only transcodes the audio. The thing that did it, was removing EAC3 from the settings(Advanced->Player->optional audio support) Now it properly transcodes only the audio for me. The video is Direct Play, and the Pi4 can cope with the audio transcode. I think there might be some confusion by the player that both the not working audio and the functionally allowed format are EAC3.

And yeah the pixel devices cant play E-AC3-JOC.

2026Edit: Recent update broke the fix, no alternative yet that I know of.

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