@Terry Cinemas said:
What’s weird is… I direct played an mkv container hevc no issues but when my brother plays the same file remote into his Xbox it transcodes the video
I would check the log to see if maybe a bit rate limit is being applied or something else possibly triggering a transcode (Such as subtitles or unsupported audio like DTS). Although, I would find it unlikely with HEVC to have a manual bit rate selected occasionally the app will default to a bitrate other than original that will trigger a transcode.
It wouldn’t be audio since it was direct playing audio and transcoding video
@slvrnblck12 said:
Could it be related to the XBox live issues or maybe Plex people turned it off?
The developers have not turned it off and it should not be related to the Xbox Live Issues as the profile is stored in the app itself.
Speaking with the developers another option could have been that when trying to direct play/stream an error occurred which forces the app to fallback into a transcoded stream so the video will still play. The only way to be sure though would be to see the logs from that time period when you were running into issues.
We’ve just enabled Direct Play support for FLAC/ALAC in MKV containers, VC1/MP3/EAC3 in MP4 containers, and FLAC/ALAC/WAV music files, and some small other tweaks. Please let us know if you encounter any issues.
@moussa.uk said:
Please let us know if you encounter any issues.
Thanks a lot.
Overall: FLAC51+HEVC is pretty stable - always getting predictable DirectPlay.
Assumption: Main issue is very weak buffering aggressiveness. Plex Media Player buffers so aggressively so you never see buffering while playing the movie. Which is good, because basically when you watching the movie the only thing that you need on Xbox is notifications - low overhead background jobs. And in Xbox One player it is hardly predictable sometimes it plays smoothly sometimes not. What causes that, hard to tell. You will not see it on low bitrates. On higher than 15Mbps bitrates it happens often.
So
proper log collection guidelines, proper logging especially on network comms would be welcome. Maybe half of the problems would go away and we can help you, guys, on real troubleshooting.
fix buffering problems
Next step in feature set expected is the support of external/internal SRT/WebVTT. As SRT/SSA/WebVTT in/with MKV is supported but very buggy on Windows right now - reported to MS several times through feedback program, and support on Xbox One is not defined yet, this would be perfect addition to full enablement.
HEVC playing and working great for me so far. Tried about 8 different files, HEVC encoded with FLAC 6 channel audio and everything is Direct Play, super fast and smooth. A+
@bPlaTyPuS said: @jmckee so it’s now fully supported? About one month ago I tried to read a movie encoded with x265 and the playback was very jerky!
If you have directplay/stream on then it may be that your device does not have enough performance to decode it locally. If you are transcoding then it may mean your plex server does not have enough horsepower. I directplay 8bit x265 on my nexus player everyday (10bit not supported locally by my player).
@bPlaTyPuS said: @a5m0 I’m playing from a Synology DS415+ to Xbox One. Not sure the XO supports x265…
I have the exact same setup. The fault may lie in the audio codecs in your MP4/MKV files. If you have AC3 or AAC audio, it’ll Directplay~~/stream ~~smooth as butter. If you have DTS audio, for example, the Synology will transcode the video to x264, and struggle to keep up.
@moussa said:
Glad testing is going well for most of you! As for the transcoding issue, unfortunately direct streaming HEVC streams to the Xbox One is not possible at the moment. Currently the server doesn’t support a HLS stream containing HEVC, but I am hopeful this will be possible in the future.
So to be perfectly clear, if your media contains a HEVC video stream and a compatible audio stream (AAC/AC3) it should Direct Play. Otherwise it will transcode down to a H.264 stream.
@bPlaTyPuS said: @Spasm wow! it’s DTS then… but why? Is it due to the XO, Synology or Plex?
Microsoft has not released a DTS decoder for 3rd party apps so it must transcode DTS to new audio. Like Spasm quoted above the server doesn’t have a way to send out HLS streams with HEVC. Because of that it is causing your HEVC to transcode to h264 which is mostly likely overloading your NAS.
OK. I’m a bit confused. Does this mean that when I DirectPlay a h264 file with DTS that the audio gets transcoded to AC3/AAC? Or does this just apply to the h265 encoded files?
@jasonxz said:
OK. I’m a bit confused. Does this mean that when I DirectPlay a h264 file with DTS that the audio gets transcoded to AC3/AAC?
Yes, it gets transcoded.
Or does this just apply to the h265 encoded files?
No, the DTS limitation is for all video codecs.
The reason you are seeing a big hit on H265 encoded files with DTS is that h264 can be copied to the HLS stream but HEVC cannot and is very cpu intensive.
The current guesstimate from the internet is that it will happen around the time universal app support is fully implemented among the microsoft platforms, but that is only the internet’s speculation.
