For several months through many versions of PMS and client versions it seems there is an issue with HD (1080p) recordings playing back on iOS and Apple TV. Audio will play back fine but the video is black.
I believe the issue is with PMS deciding to “Direct Stream” the video which the client devices are unable to play (see my proof below)
PMS: Mac mini MacOS latest version of Sierra with latest Plex Pass version of PMS
clients: ATV4, iPad and iPhone all exhibiting the problem.
Here are some observations that I believe may show where the problem lies:
The issue DOESN’T happen when playing the item on Plex Web (although the recording starts with a full screen of garbled green before correcting within a couple of seconds
While playing on affected clients the status on PMS is “Transcoding . 'Direct Stream” . Under the iOS client playback info shows the following:
If I go into the quality setting on iOS device and change the quality from “Play Original Quality” to “Convert Automatically” then BOOM magically the file starts playing just fine (after quite a few seconds of transcoding).
Here is a screenshot of the media info of one of the affected shows (1080p HD) .
If I perform an “Optimise for TV version” (which unfortunately takes almost as long to convert as recording it) then the show plays back just fine! Here is the Media info of the optimised version of the file that DOES work:
So I STRONGLY suspect there is something majorly screwey with PMS ability to direct stream these files to the clients and only a forced transcode fixes the issue. I’m guessing the clients are unable to play back the original file yet PMS keeps trying to serve it to them.
On Apple TV the only way to fix the problem is by going into the settings of either the episode itself or the Plex ATV app’s global settings and changing the video quality to “4Mbps 720p” or below. Anything higher than that and it refuses to show video, only audio plays.
I have been having this same problem for quite some time with Plex and AppleTV
I love my AppleTV4 but I’m so invested in Plex that I’m willing to switch to a TV client that’s appointed by the Plex team as the best seat-back experience and I hope is not an actual computer with a funky keyboard
Can someone point me in the right direction? Is it the NVIDIA Shield?
@SirGio said:
I have been having this same problem for quite some time with Plex and AppleTV
I love my AppleTV4 but I’m so invested in Plex that I’m willing to switch to a TV client that’s appointed by the Plex team as the best seat-back experience and I hope is not an actual computer with a funky keyboard
Can someone point me in the right direction? Is it the NVIDIA Shield?
The Plex client on the Apple TV is probably one of the buggiest ones along the Plex lineup. Along with the DVR playback issue I explained above I also experience the ‘shows ending prematurely with 1-2min to go’ as others have posted on these forums.
Over the last few weeks I’ve experimented with the following.
-Plex Media Player
The very same DVR recordings that fail on the Apple TV play just fine. Unfortunately the player has a horrible UI and the app appears to have been abandoned over the last year by Plex as far as development goes.
-Plex Kodi add on
one of the best looking Plex clients. Once again plays the DVR recordings in question just fine. App started off with huge development effort …and you guessed it once again Plex seems to have ‘dumped and run’ with the last update to the app over 6 months ago!
-Android TV (eg Shield)
May be better but if you live in a country that does PAL for television there are some concerns about how well Android TV handles 50fps television from the forums I’ve read.
Conclusion?
ATV Plex client is the bottom of the barrel if you want reliability and playability. Sadly the clients that do work better seem to be neglected by Plex which means that any DVR functionality (eg Live TV , Guide etc) are unlikely to come to them any time soon…
If you want a DVR that is currently in a better state of affairs I suggest looking elsewhere than Plex…a lot more work is required to bring it up to scratch…
My workaround for an ATV 4K seems to be different (works as well for the iPad pro 2015)
So my setting in the general settings to kick transcoding is 1080p 12MBs which is different to your observation. But this seems to be hardware dependent, since one other guy had to go down to 1080p 8MBs before getting it working.
The per view/file fix is still also working with 1080p 20MBs
I have the same kind of material, it is also 1080i@50, its is not progressive it is interlaced as you can see in the original Media Info Screenshot.
My converting to 1080p30 you somehow found a workaround, which is time consuming. So I understand well that you want to avoid this. p30 in result should be anyway suboptimal because it should create some unwanted judder, 1080p25 should be the better target.
On an ATV 4 or 4k or iOS, try Infuse or MrMc for playback. Plex CANNOT playback reliably unless you have a VERY, VERY, VERY high powered server. Plex only utilizes your server for transcoding and doesn’t use the processing power on iOS nor tvOS devices.
the ONLY way to reliably make ATV work with olex is to either force plex to transcode EVERYTHING… as direct playback is buggy even with the limited codec support offered by Apples API playback engine (plex refuses to code its own player like VLC, MrMc, Infuse etc)
second option is to transcode your entire library and store all media encoded by handbrake for ATV that uses m4v container, h264 (although 265 will work if you use the nightly build and make a few edits to the device profile)…
direct play of specifically encoded m4v files generally work OK, but it DEFEATS the whole point of running plex.
@dragonmel, I totally agree with you, the only thing to mention is that Plex for ATV removed the option “Always transcode” so a workaround would be to set it to transcode to a specific resolution and bitrate.
exactly… that is the way I do it to force a transcode if I need it… I mostly keep everything in the proper m4v format now since this has been broken for a long time… plex sync is horrible and if I want something on my ipad for a trip I can just drop the movie on my ipad and go and play it with the ipads native player and bypass plex all together for a headache free experiance
the latest drop of the plex client today brings back the allow direct stream/play function but I have yet to test it.
