It depends on the client app and the device true capability. I have a little bit more than that, with around 4560 movies and more than 24000 episodes, plex client app for Android has been very far from ideal to say the most polite way.
My household is android based ranging from nvidia-shield tv the most powerful Andros client to android tv boxes, smart tv, tablets and phones. I can tell you that reading the logs, the app crashed easy too often for trivial things such as crashing when app is out of focus, when trying to playback item, when MDE sort of getting confused, etc. There’s so many cases that MDE decided to tell pms to send a trasncoded version of the media either both video and audio transcoded or either of them. But in reality it’s wrong decision. Because first, by bypassing plex ‘smart’ feature such as MDE for example by choosing external media player, or by moving the movie copy file into single entry, suddenly the client can direct play. Plex almost seems to have this stance : let’s make the plex for Android player as picky as possible and let’s throw cryptic messages at end user. For example, error, media player error due to a conversion, error transcoding error, or can’t play the media at certain resolution (just because mde got confused by the media or when it’s anamorphic) , error:network connection too slow to pms, or suddenly the decision to transcode just because of mde can’t read audio or video stream at the time of use trying to play the media. A lot of this stupid cryptic error or mde decision to transcode. But once you bypass this ‘smart’ plex feature then suddenly your device can play the media directly. For example, error : this client can’t play this media at this certain resolution, which then results mde asking pms to transcode the media. You can bypass this by playing the media via plex dlna and you will find that your client can direct play the media just fine. Or other error such as connection too slow, error on media conversion, etc etc. Once you try to choose mxplayer as external player of the plex android app, suddenly you can play all your media just fine.
In my other thread I just reported another stupid bug, if you have copies of media of the same title but maybe with lower bit rate and different audio format, plex seems to ignore user selection and can only play the first entry listed in the database. More on that the plex app is so buggy it doesn’t refresh its UI on playback, it will still show the first entry Metadata and audio detail.
I don’t know whether it’s really mde fault or transcoding engine fault or pms or android client fault or plex faulty way of HLS implementation but bottom line is that plex is basically a media cataloging and media playing software. So plex must provide at least this 2 basic function flawlessly. It’s clear that many of the problems can have work around by choosing external player such as mxplayer or by using plex dlna, or by forcing to direct play, a feature that is available in older version of client app. The ui and the background process have gone through so much changes but I guess the lack of testing and getting logs from users made the developers turn blind to its current reality.
2 Likes
