Moving this from the NAS & Devices forums to here as it seems even more closely tied to the client, not server.
Server Version#: 1.42.2.10156
Player Version#: 10.30.4.4092 (on Google TV)
I noticed failures playing some recent 4K mkv files, with “An error occured. Please check your connection.” But it was not network related as other higher-bitrate 4k movies would load fine; and when I turned on subtitles (forcing a transcode) the problematic files would load fine too, if slowly. Looking more closely at which ones were failing, they all seem to be DOVI Profile 8 Level 10, with HDR10 as a backup. I even found a 1080p DOVI P8-L10 file that also wouldn’t load. DV files that were P7-L6 didn’t load either, presumably for DV licensing reasons based on other threads I read, but the HDR fallback would load fine. Also, files with DOVI P8-L6 played as DV too. So it’s just the P8-L10 files for some reason, even across files produced by two different encoders.
In the server side logs, it appears to decide early that the file must be transcoded: “Direct Play is disabled”, “media must be transcoded in order to use the hls protocol” and then “no direct play video profile exists for http/mkv/hevc” etc appear first after the request for a P8-L10 file is received. It then seems to try to transcode it, but fails, for reasons not explained in the logfile.
I’ll note that Kodi, on the same device, plays these files normally, whether directly over NFS from the server or via the PM4K/PlexMod add-on (which is really coming along! might switch to this!).
If this is expected behavior due to licensing issues in the player with Dolby, then it’s understandable, however the error message then (“check your connection”) should really be improved since it has nothing to do with bandwidth. That also wouldn’t explain why it wouldn’t just fall back to HDR, or why these P8-L10 movies play fine with the Plex player on my Google Pixel 6 phone.
Happy to share logs and point to samples but strictly over DM for obv reasons.
Thanks!
