Playback on both devices will fail if I select a subtitle from the subtitle selection. To get the media playing, I first select none then play the media. During playback, I go to the playback setting and select a subtitle. Log says, Video and Audio and Subtitle are direct playable. (The logs uploaded are from Android TV only but similar error appears on Fire TV)
Server Version#: 1.18.7.2438
Player Version#: [Fire TV]: 7.28.0.15501 (ba34f115) [Android TV]: 7.29.01.15583 (31eb3784)
The Plex Media Player should be able to direct play it.
Here are some scenarios
If I play the media without subtitle it direct plays.
If I play the media with a subtitle selected before playing, it fails.
If I play the media without subtitle then select a subtitle during playback, it direct plays.
Experiencing this as well for the past month or so. Super annoying. Reinstalled both the Plex server from scratch (docker on unRAID) and the Android TV client, no joy. If I disable subtitles before starting playback, it will start OK and can then enable subtiles during playback with no issue. Also it happens quite often that the client announces that connection to the server has been lost - only happens after a file has successfully been played and Play next screen should appear. Will attach logs when I find the time.
I’m investigating the issue you have reported but I haven’t been able to replicate it yet. Would you be able to create a sample of the video that fails?
If you can you could also try to disable the new player in the Plex for Android settings and seeing if the video plays without issues in our old player.
Yes, old player play the video perfectly fine. Also if a video has close caption like from a DVR recording, the video plays without audio and it is like playing in fast forward and skips a lot.
Experiencing very similar problems here with a Synology DS1019 streaming h264 and h265 1080p mp4s with embedded VobSub titles to FireTV Sticks 4k and a FireTV Cube. Connected on WiFi with consistent speeds of 100s of MBits/s (and, not at it matters, connected to a fiber-optic ISP with consistent speeds up and down between 500 and 1000 MBps).
All of these devices are fairly recent, supposedly capable of 4k for which I have little content. So I mainly got them to be sure that there was enough headroom that I’d be able to run Plex snappy and without any issues, just like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
And, yet, when trying to play files with subtitles on the Fire* devices, I usually get an error on start, though sometimes enabling subtitles later works. But even if it works, the strain on the server, which is apparently transcoding, is sufficiently great to max out one of the CPU cores on an otherwise unloaded server and still cause stutter every few minutes. And that was where no transcoding should be needed and on a server which reportedly has hardware accelerated transcoding up to 4k.
Same server, same files, same subtitles, work nearly perfectly when played on the Plex client on iPads or the in-browser player.
