Home Movies upside down only in plex for android-tv

Plex Players
1

Server Version#: 1.42.2.10156
Player Version#: 10.30.6.4151 (f1455a3f)

I see several old posts on here about home movies playing with the incorrect orientation on the a Plex client, but playing as expected elsewhere. In all those posts I do not see any consistent programmatic fix. Normally the posts seem to either not gain any traction or the OP stops responding when someone from plex asks for a sample file.

I am running my head into the wall on this right now. I have several hundred home movies doing this. I can manually force the movies to transcode and the orientation will be correct in plex for android-tv, but I don’t like that as a long term solution. I’d like to understand why the behavior is what it is, so either plex can be made better, or I can script a fix to the metadata of my files. All the files play fine in vlc on windows and linux, and they seem to play fine on the plex android client. IT is only the plex app for my smart tv (androidTV) that exhibits this behavior.

2

I guess no one at plex wants to look into this issue?

3

IIRC, the Android TV client doesn’t read/consider the tag in a video specifying the orientation when direct-playing it. This usually only matters for home videos you took with a smartphone.

The server however will consider this when transcoding such videos and provide the output in the correct orientation. Hence, a known workaround when watching such videos on an Android TV is to enforce the video being transcoded (e.g. by selecting a target quality different from the original).

4

Is there a way I could use ffmpeg or similar to get my home videos pre configured? I’d rather not have my server need to transcode unless absolutely necessary. Im not opposed to use my workstation to prep the videos

5

Sorry, I won’t be of much help with this. When googling this, I found a few suggestions using information from MediaInfo (which can identify/show if a video has a rotation tag) and ffmpeg (to apply a rotation) – that being said, I couldn’t find any immediate solutions in the ffmpeg documentation.

Edit: depending on how urgent this is for you, it might be worth to check if you have the same issue on the Android mobile apps – if not, there’s a chance this is fixed in the new experience apps which will at some point also come to Android TV (though, there’s no ETA).

6

thats good to know, they do play fine in the android client and the plex for web, so hopefully the smart TV platform can get a release soon-ish to reach parity