Interlaced content now transcoding on Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K?

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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For you info, all channel that I received from antenna that are in progressive are in DirectPlay, and all channel that are received in 1080i are transcoded.

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The change we did was for interlaced and the change today I believe is to only do it for livetv

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Why does live/recorded tv need to be transcoded on these devices? I understand that there is an issue with Freeview in the UK, but canā€™t this be worked around based on channel line-up or country code? I purchased at Fire TV Stick 4K specifcally so that I didnā€™t have to tanscode Live TV/DVR content.

I can provide logs later today if that is still helpful.

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As far as I know it is a google bug and the change to transcoder was to circumvent it

And this relates to it https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/94031/mpeg2-decoding-on-the-new-fire-tv-2017-no-longer-s.html

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Was that definitely the 4k stick
I thought it came out end 2018, that article is 2017

There was an issue with SD mpeg2 content on the stick, for me the issue was resolved by an Amazon update in April/May (ish) 2019
However, there is still an issue with HD content (Freeview UK), but i dont beleive this is mpeg2, the HD channels i think use H264 in a ts container
it has the same symtoms as the mpeg2 issue

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Might be wrong link. Might be this one https://github.com/amzn/exoplayer-amazon-port/issues/94

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Thanks for the extra info

I still beleive it is wrong to blame all interalced content on this issue, the majority of reports in these topics all seem to relate to h264 content (which is the UK HD Muxes, they do have a few SD channels in this format so these might have the issue also)

As we saw yesterday with the new build you gave me to test, the interlaced SD content is fine on the 4K stick

As long as the people with the issue can now watch live tv, thats the important part

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Plex for Android 7.29.0 is being released which changes the recent fix for interlaced video to ensure that it is only done for Live TV and not video playback

See

  • Ensure only Live TV interlaced content is force transcoded on Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K.
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Ok, this is just silly. According to the Github issue thread above, the issue is affecting h264 interlaced content on Amazon Fire TV Stick 4Ks, whether they are from LiveTV or not.

Iā€™ve never had an issue with LiveTV mpeg2 encoded interlaced US OTA content on this device. Can we narrow this workaround down further?

Also, the thread above mentions that a firmware fix for these devices should be going out in Q2. Can we expect this work around to be reverted when the underlying bug is fixed?

Thanks

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That is the current plan

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Ok, I can live with that. Thanks sharing this info!

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Seriously? I only bought this 4K Fire Stick 6 months ago because I was tired of my Roku Ultraā€™s inability to reliably play live OTA 1080i content without forcing a transcode. The Fire Stick remedied this perfectly until this update, playing my live OTA 1080i channels via direct play without a single issue. Now Iā€™m back to having anything with fast motion on these channels looking like a jittery mess because nothing is going to live transcode up from 1080i to 1080p and look good.

FWIW, Iā€™m feeding these from a HDHomerun Quatro and watching the same feed, not transcoded, via the HDHomerun app works just fine. From what the HDHomerun devs have told me in the past, theyā€™re just using the built in video player and not doing anything specialā€¦just passing the MPEG2 stream directly through to it.

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7.29.0 seems not available yet on Amazon App Store

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Iā€™ve tried the latest beta 7.29.0.15876 beta (arm-v7a).

It works like a charm. But Iā€™ve another issue with their beta player (coming from 7.28), Iā€™ll go back to 7.27 to solve also that issue.

Andrea

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Thanks for the feedback. Has this other issue been reported in the forum? Any logs?

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Hi, no itā€™s not reported. Iā€™m pretty new with Plex, I need to see how to collect logs ā€¦ let me see :slight_smile:

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sorry for the OT, but ā€¦ how can I collect logs from my fire stick 4k?

The playback error happens when I use the new video player

edit: found it, I will create a new post for it

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Thank you :slight_smile:

I have all info required, but I canā€™t open a new topic :frowning:

How can I do that? or how can I share info and issue?

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Some quirks in the forum - I think you need to do some more forum reading / browsing before you can raise a topic - not too much but enough for the built-in algorithms to trigger