HTPC Playback Doesn't Start

Plex Players
1

Just started to look at Plex HTPC and ran into a big problem. Fresh install all settings default and playback won’t start (or at least seems to take ages) for all videos. Short videos (1-2 mins) eventually start playing but longer ones just sit there.

I figure it must be buffering (even though I have DirectPlay / DirectStream set to default Yes) and Varys shows playback with “direct” settings correct.

I decided to download the newer version of MPV engine from Sourceforge as per instructions in Plex Forum here, remembering to add appropriate certificate change in mpv.conf as per instructions.

Playback now starts immediately first time every time.

I don’t like the idea of having to manually manage mpv-1.dll as any update is likely to overwrite it, so if anyone has any ideas on how to get the supplied library to work then great. But if others are seeing the same problem, here is a potential solution for you.

2

With the original library in place, experiment with the Settings
Video - Use Hardware Acceleration
and
Video - Video Playback Quality

3

Thanks Otto. Thanks for the quick response.

I should have written that before upgrading the engine I had previously tried the following (restarting the client between each change)

  • turning off Hardware Acceleration
  • turning off DirectPlay and DirectStream
  • changing Video Playback quality to ensure stream was transcoding, with target quality below original and above
  • starting playback in fullscreen and windowed modes
  • starting playback for both completely unplayed files and partially played (resume playback)
  • clutching at straws, normalise multi-channel audio (even though my PC has a 5.1 system attached

So I had a reasonable experiment with settings. I was looking at the release notes for MPV 0.34.1 to see what differed from the 0.33 that comes with Plex HTPC. One thing that surprised me greatly was that 0.33 is 491MB in size whilst the replacement 0.34 is only 76MB ??

There seems to be myriad fixes and changes which might be relevant to my system (W10 x64 fully updated; Intel 11700k, nVidia 3080Ti (lastest driver), two monitors though only one active.

So I guess I just continue with 0.34.0-300-g9022b1b51d which I think the release notes refer to as 0.34.1.

I’ll try installing on my main HTPC (Intel i5 based with Intel graphics) and see if it works on that.

4

Works fine on my main HTPC. But configuring passthru seems more complicated than expected (was expecting settings in Audio ala PMP). Eventually discovered MPV help where mpv.conf settings are defined.

audio-channels=7.1,5.1,stereo
audio-spdif=ac3,dts,dts-hd,eac3,truehd

Works great after. Would suggest those appear in @gbooker02 hints and tips.

5

They are there.

6

OK. But not while the audio device is set to Autoselect Device.

One I selected my specific HDMI device they did appear - so good but not particularly intuitive.

7

So ironically, I was experiencing the playback not starting issue and tried reinstalling, changing MPV libraries, reset, all with no success. What caused it for me was setting my audio device to my AVR over HDMI rather than leaving it as default. I don’t have any other AV output so it’s not a big deal, but the fact that it causes video to not play hung me up for a couple of hours

8

Brilliant and weird?! So I reverted to the original supplied engine and changed the audio device from Autoselect to a specific output - in my case Speakers (Realtek USB) - and that fixed the playback starting issue.

So that last piece of the HTPC puzzle for me will be to work out why my MCE remote play/pause keys aren’t working. I can see from the “Introducing …” post that some input mappings have changed but no mention of the MCE remote media keys previously working and not now by default.

Beginning to like Plex HTPC now I’m understanding its foibles.

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