I’d say this is a continuation of the following thread:
My setup:
Server version 1.41.3.9314 (Running on Ubuntu)
Plex Web player version 4.145.0
App’s
Plex version 10.26.0.2578
Plex Photos version 0.2.0 (1084)
Plex TV version 10.26.0.2578
I have managed to isolate the issue on Plex Android apps.
When a video recorded on the phone is being played through Plex Web player, it is correctly orientated.
When played through any of the above-mentioned apps, this is the result:
IIRC this is related to the player used for direct playing videos on the Android client doesn’t respect/consider any of the technical metadata in the video that tells the orientation.
Hence, while direct playing, the video will appear in a wrong orientation if recorded in a different orientation.
If the video is being transcoded (e.g. for playback in Plex Web), the transcoder does respect that orientation tag and the video is displayed correctly.
Can you try setting some different quality in the Android TV app when playing the video to confirm this will result in the correct orientation (anything other than original/max quality).
Slight correction, video being played in Plex Web player either original quality or transcoded is always shown in correct orientation which is portrait for this particular video.
Here are the tests you have requested from Android TV plex app. Orientation is still off. I have tried to show as much details possible, hopefully it will help
Please note that the results are the same across all Plex Android apps.
Please let know what we can try next. If it would help, I would be willing to send you the video in question so you can test on your own, if that would speed things up.
Hey @sixones,
I have seen thanks to plex notifications that you have managed to access the video from multiple devices. Thank you for your time and effort. Have you managed to reproduce the issue? Is there anything else I could do to help?
I’ve noticed something strange today.
I’ve added another video which is orientated correctly on all Plex Android apps. The video was recorded using the same Phone as the previous one, it was synced the same way from Google Drive to HDD where Plex Server can access it… From what I can tell, there is nothing different between this video and the one I have shared with you previously.
I’ve shared it with you via Plex so you can take a look.
Hey @sixones
I’ve uploaded another video and it’s wrongly orientated.
The video was recorded using the same Phone as the previous ones. It was synced the same way from Google Drive to HDD, where Plex Server can access it…
Again, I’ve shared it with you via Plex so you can take a look.
Any update from you or any other Plex Employee would be greatly appreciated.
Hey @sixones
I’ve noticed the discrepancy
When you do “Get Info” on a video with incorrect orientation you can see this:
“Web optimized - Yes”
In XML, it is shown as: optimizedForStreaming=“1”
When you do “Get Info” on a video with the correct orientation you can see this:
“Web optimized - No”
In XML, it is shown as: optimizedForStreaming=“0”
Could it be that Plex Server is performing some quick video optimization on newly added videos causing this issue on its Android apps? Is there a way to change this attribute manually and test this theory?
Updated versions of the Server and apps are at the top of this post.
Needless to say, the issue is persisting. If we exclude Tom’s and Sixones initial interest, no assistance or assurance came from Plex. It feels like Plex is looking to sweep this years long lasting self-inflicted bug under the rug…
I am experiencing the same issue …
Videos recorded on my phone in portrait mode are being played in landscape mode on the Plex app installed on my Fire TV. It doesn’t matter if the videos are transcoded or played via Direct Play – the result is the same.
I’ve noticed a couple of changes with the latest Plex Android app updates so I thought to come back to this post and give you guys an update.
With the Plex Android version 10.26.0.2578, the issue is still present however, if you turn on Conversion, orientation becomes correct but, the video gets stretched horizontally. The resulting video sits somewhere between uncanny valley and nightmare fuel. Please, see it for yourself.
Same: videos taken in portrait mode play in landscape mode on Roku, Amazon Fire, and Samsung TV clients. Those same videos play in the expected orientation in VLC or through the Plex web app.
I see dozens of threads on this topics across Plex and Reddit forums, and it looks like a long-standing issue. I have not yet found a viable solution:
I’ve tried various tagging tools, trying to interact with Rotation and Matrix tags. I don’t know enough to know if I’m doing that properly, but have not observed any change in playback.
I see many recommendations about transcoding. I’m not sure if there’s a reliable method to losslessly transcode without producing a new file. With 15k+ files, I hope not to have to duplicate them to fix this.
If transcoding is necessary, I would think it would need to include a method to programmatically identify which files don’t display properly and batch-transcoding, rather than manually identifying them. I don’t know how to do that either.
Frustrating to see this problem linger so long. I understand that portrait mode isn’t preferred for video, but realistically it’s not going away.
While waiting for Plex to figure out this bug, my kid who you can see in the screenshots above has found the workaround.
He has disabled auto-rotation on his tablet, and when he plays the video, he rotates the tablet so he can see the video in the correct orientation.
Even 6-year-old is forced to find clever solutions. Come on Plex, you can do better.
For what it’s worth, I was finally able to get a file oriented properly but the method is not realistically feasible:
I played around with using ffmpeg to just correct the rotation data without re-encoding. I was never able to get this to work.
Apparently by default ffmpeg does correct rotation to match the metadata, so a relatively simple command produced a file which properly rotates in all applications: ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 output_file.mp4
Perhaps this method is useful for some of you with only a few problematic videos, but for me it isn’t viable:
Without a way to programmatically identify which files Plex will fail to orient, I would have to run this on my entire library (32k+ files, plus every future file)
The output file was 1/3 the size of the original. Perhaps there are some tuning options I’m unfamiliar with, but assuming this indicates degradation from the original files I’d have to maintain originals for thousands of files.
Encoding time! If half my library is mis-oriented and encoding time is just 30 seconds/file, I’m looking at 133 days of re-encoding.
MOST NOTABLY I just realized that Jellyfin does this all correctly right out of the box. Not only do the videos playback in the right orientation, but the thumbnails are correct too. I really don’t want to leave Plex but this is a pretty major deficiency for my home.
