How I fixed my HVEC/AAC/XBox One Constant Buffering (for certain encodes/files)

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
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Recently I tried to encode two videos with Handbrake with the same settings I always do (x265/HVEC, AAC 5.1) and noticed that the videos just instantly were in a “Buffering” state forever, never playing on XBox One. Not even subtitles enabled. Direct Play/Stream show as true, but somehow they cannot play.

However, these same videos appeared to play fine on my Android 9.x device.

So then I tried re-encoding with H.264 and had the same problem! So at this point I was really scratching my head.

For kicks, I changed the setting for Audio encode in Handbrake to AC3/5.1 and voila! Now the videos play perfectly.

I had previously encoded my whole collection via Handbrake at x265/AAC 5.1 so, I’m thinking something must have changed with the way it encodes AAC 5.1 audio since version 1.2.0 (that’s when it seems to have stopped working).

Anyway, I had looked at a lot of other XBox One/Buffering/HVEC threads before that didn’t help, hopefully this can help someone! :slight_smile:

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We are all seemingly dealing with buffering issues with the Xbox. My main issues are 4k HDR videos buffering at exactly 3 mins and other 1080P DTS files buffering at some variation of 15 min increments.

I’ve tried begging Plex devs to work with me looking at logs and or suggesting workaround but have never got a legit response.

So seems for the time being Xbox and Plex do not work well together and their is no idea when or if this will be fixed.

I have tried to recode some videos on the 4k HDR side to AC3 5.1 and it did not help. In general I’m not going to the trouble of re coding mf files to maybe fix the issue now when a new issues may crop up breaking them.

Plex Devs just need to fix this stuff plain and simple

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I have the same problem ever since I updated Handbrake to 1.2. A new 1.2.2 version of Handbrake appears to be released and I am trying to re-encode a few of my recent files to see if the issue is fixed.

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I use the nightly beta build of handrbrake cause it support 4k HDR and have had good luck with it

I used this ffmpeg command to strip out the audio of my 4k HDR files and replace it with AC3 5.1 and have had a much better experience playing 4k HDR now that I’ve done more testing

Run this from the FFMPEG folder with the exe in it and put your video files in the same folder

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c: copy -c:a ac3 -b:a 640k output.mkv

So short answer is Xbox and Plex have issues iwth Non AAC/AC3 audio and it really crops up bad when doing 4k HDR an non AAC/AC3

DTS, DTS-MA, TrueHD, Atmos these audio codecs will all choke up Plex and Xbox

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OK, So I updated my Handbrake to version 1.2.2 and re-encoded a few movies and TV shows from the source files that had issues encoded in version 1.2.0 and now they play fine the XBOX. I encoded in H265 with AAC 5.1 Audio both times.

It seems it may have just been an issue with Handbrake 1.2.0. Thankfully I only have about 8 video files to re-encode.

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