Thank you for asking…
It is just the Plex app which is restarting (more often) or playback stopping prematurely (less often). I have three of these devices and no player alternatives, so I am left with whatever stability the Plex app on these FireTVs offers to me.
Other apps don’t do that (though I am using these less often) and the FireTV system itself is stable - rock-solid so to say.
Lately, I even had situations where “scrolling” fast through a movie library with its posters let the app crash. This was about one or two weks ago.
But most of the time, it is crashing during playback - after playing for a couple of seconds or at some point throughout the movie.
So we don’t get too off topic on this thread, if you want us to look at those issues, please start a new thread and provide details and logs. it could also be related to the specific model of the Fire TV you have. I have the 3 and 4 and don’t see app crashes, well I do sometimes, but it’s not very common.
I also have this issue which I think is relevant to the old Exoplayer used by Plex. I hope we keep our vendors updated so that the bugs will be fixed by the community itself (google for the case of Exoplayer).
Okay, that’s not a problem. Let’s go back to where this query started. We have been asking for SSA subtitling direct play support for over 3 years. We create tons of threads on forums. The only answers during this time were “use transcoding”, “the player does not support direct SSA playback”. But Exoplayer has been supporting this for over a year now. And actively fixing and improoving.
Well, if you think that you don’t need to update the player, just fix the SSA already. Most of the playback issues will disappear if we do not have to get a deterioration in the quality of the video and system freeze only from the fact that YOUR player does not know how to work with SSA in 2020.
That being said… Even the basic rendering ExoPlayer currently offers would be an improvement on the current situation with the Plex android app, and I’ll take it, until a better solution is available…
I assume updating ExoPlayer is less work than replacing the player with a different one altogether, and if support was improved upstream that would be preferable to replacing the player with a different one? I do however find it a bit disheartening thinking about how long time that could take, considering how slow/infrequent it seems that Plex updates the player in the android app, on top of having Google add proper support first, which is anyone’s guess when happens.
Plex for Kodi does support ass/ssa through the Kodi android player, so from an end user perspective that player seems like a much better choice over ExoPlayer for format support at least.
No, it doesn’t really do that to an adequate level at the moment, because ExoPlayer (in Plex for Android) doesn’t support a lot of basic ASS/SSA features. For example overlapping subtitles and basic positioning, as that wasn’t added until late last year by Google. We are still waiting for those improvements to trickle downstream.
And again nothing change. “If you set the subtitle mode to “image only” ASS/SSA subs will be direct played with only the text” but this is doesn’t work. If plex found ussoported feature on subtitle file, it don’t display any subs.
Regardless of whether you use the old or new player, the version of ExoPlayer doesn’t change. It changes some ways in how we interact with ExoPlayer, but the underlying engine is unaffected.
