FireTV (and Android Phone) Video playing fast and with no audio

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 1.18.9.2571
Player Version#: Not sure about the FireTV because I’m not at home, but the Android version is 7.30.0.16390
I can report back with the FireTV version in a couple hours.

I know Plex on Android has had issues with MKV files in the past, but within the last couple of months, my FireTV at home would play MKV files at double speed and without audio. Sometimes clearing the cache will work and sometimes, if the file is HD and up, I can force it to transcode and get it to play fine. Both of these “solutions” don’t always work. If I get my Plex server to convert the files to MP4, they then play flawlessly. This is happening on my new files as well as my old files. For me, I can work around it most of the time, but for people like my mother, it’s a problem. I’ve pulled my logs and the only thing I see related to this is the following as an example.

ERROR - Caught exception trying to stream file: /transcode/Transcode/Sessions/plex-transcode-55fbebac9672af9b-com-plexapp-android-d58e6f8d-356a-4419-a6c2-fbcc9ea2698a/media-00227.ts: write: protocol is shutdown

The MKVs are H264 version 4.1 with AAC audio and the working converted files are H264 version 4.0 with AAC audio in an MP4 container.

If I could disable Direct Play and Direct Stream, I think this would be fine, but FireTV (and the android phone I’m testing on) do not have the option to disable Direct Play/Stream.

Anyone else having similar issues? And if so, is there a way to fix it aside from converting everything? It’s a consistent result across different FireTVs.

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Not sure if FireTV has the option or not, but for Android TV just turn off the new player in the settings to disable the Broken and Absolute trash they call a new player and have now made the primary option after every update.

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FireTV version is 7.29.2.16071

Disabling the new player did not help me for this issue. Thanks for the idea though.

It would be nice just to have the option to disable Direct Play/Stream on the FireTV. Every other smart TV I’ve messed with has that option.

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So I picked a different file and did a little bit of testing. This file is an MKV H264 version 3.1 with AAC audio.

I enabled debug in my logs scanning through it, I don’t see anything logged that indicates it’s having issue with the file.

My settings are normally set to play original quality if the file is small enough. If I change the quality to convert automatically while it’s playing sped up, it will start to play normally. With that I figured I’d go into my settings and set that to the default. When I start playing the file with convert automatically enabled, it still plays sped up until I flip to original and then back to convert during playback. It’s a very weird issue.

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