Issue with player on samsung tv and hisense tv

Plex Players
,
1

I will provide the logs when I get back home. I have already enabled debug logging on both TVs.

Here is my setup and the issues I am facing.

Server setup

Plex Media Server is running on my home PC

Server is fully up to date

connected via Ethernet

Using gpu 3090 to transcode

Internet connection is fiber optic

I am currently away from home, also on a fiber optic connection.

There are no updates available for the Plex app on either TV.

Issue 1 – Playback failure on Samsung TV

On a Samsung TV, I cannot play a specific TV show (Show B). Playback fails with an error similar to “Impossible to convert”.

What is confusing:

The same episode plays without any issue on my phone using the Plex app, on the same network

Other content (including 4K movies) plays perfectly fine on the Samsung TV

I do not get any bandwidth or connection warnings

The screen stays black until I press buttons on the remote, then the error message appears

Because of this, I don’t understand:

Why Plex is trying to transcode

Why transcoding would fail only on this TV

Additional note:

On a Hisense TV, the error message is more explicit:

“Conversion failed, transcoding can’t start.”

Issue 2 – Subtitle-related error on Hisense TV

On a Hisense TV, enabling subtitles causes playback to fail.

The same movie:

Works fine without subtitles on the Hisense TV

Works fine with subtitles on the Samsung TV

Works fine with subtitles on my phone

The error shown on the Hisense TV is:

“An unexpected error occurred.”

Unfortunately, there is no error code, which makes troubleshooting very difficult.

So to resume

Tv hisense > play movie A > work

Tv hisense > play movie A with sub > error

samsung tv > play movie A with sub > work

Samung tv > play show B with sub > error

Tv hisense > play show B with sub > error

Smartphone > play show b with sub > work

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2

I was able to identify the root cause of the issue with TV Show B.

The problem is caused by a specific subtitle track, which triggers a transcoding failure.
The file contains multiple subtitle tracks, and only one of them causes the issue, which strongly suggests an issue with the tv app rather than a general playback issue.

Because my phone with plex has no issue playing any subtitle including the one make make the tvs do an error message.

Disabling that specific subtitle track or changing to another allows the episode to play normally (on tvs)

What I still don’t understand is how such a very small file (a subtitle track) can completely break transcoding and prevent playback.

Additionally, it would really help if the TV apps displayed subtitle track names instead of only the language.
When all tracks are shown as:

  • English

  • English

  • English

  • English

it becomes almost impossible to identify which track is causing the problem.

Being able to see the actual track name or format would make troubleshooting and track selection much easier.

Also it would help to really have an error code for this instead of a general error

3

All sub format are SRT, so anyone from plex can tell my why the phone work while tv can’t read them ?

4

Are you saying that there are 4 subtitle tracks, all in SRT format, but only one of them triggers the issue?
If that is the case, I’d load one after another into Subtitle Edit and look for differences.
First thing to look at is the text encoding of the file. It must be “UTF (with BOM)”.
If it’s anything else, use the drop-down selector to change that and save.

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Second thing is to let SubtitleEdit look for common issues. (use the encircled button)
Most important are overlapping time codes (most TVs can only show one line at once),
non-contiguous line numbers,
empty lines,
and insertions in a different text encoding.
(a certain subtitle hosting site is infamous for doing this, to insert advertising)

5

But how come the tv app is having issue, while the app on the phone read anything

6

Because they are still completely different apps.

7

Maybe but its not like this app version is for an exotic use of plex on a smartfridge or in a car….its for a tv, and not an obcure brand, its samsung.

So saying its a different app is not a great excuse wheen its about a subtitle file in a mkv that work on a smartphone but not on a tv…kind of defeat the purpose of an app to play media to have issue on a tv.

So i do hope this get fix

I would accept the blame if the sub couldn’t play anywhere, that is not the case here. So its an app issue