Hello
I have some bizarre problems with Plex on the Amazon Fire TV4k. Similar problems have been mentioned in different threads but mine seems slightly unique to all of them so figured I would provide as much insight as possible in the hope Plex staff can get a fix.
I use the Live TV & DVR feature to record DVB-T2 streams in the UK. These streams are broadcast 1080p and 1080i show-dependent and record successfully and playback flawlessly on all other devices I have tried.
On the FireTV there seem to be a multitude of problems. Sometimes I experience a few seconds of video playback, before the video freezes and audio continues (live and recorded), and the plex app has pretty much crashed and requires restart to fix. This is pretty identical to [BUG] Plex for Android with FireTV 4k - video freezes after a few seconds, audio keeps playing this topic. Sometimes a recorded video will play ok if left to its own devices but as soon as I try to skip adverts I hit a problem - if I skip in to an area of video that has not yet buffered, the crash will happen again. (I can usually skip about 60s successfully).
I have noticed that broadcasts in 1080i record successfully and when played back are transcoded to 1080p with success. Recordings in 1080p seem to experience the freezing problem above unless the h.264 maximum in settings is set to a lower than recommended value (3.2 works ok as it forces transcoding, 4-5.2 not so much).
One very strange issue I have noted is as follows. If the “transcoded interlaced live tv” is set to on, 1080p live TV also transcodes with the error “this media is not compatible with this device”, but if this is set to off, direct play appears successful and the dashboard indicates this is h264 1080p as expected. This setting should not affect a broadcast in 1080p, since it is not interlaced, but it does. After a few minutes of playback, the same issue as above resurfaces.
In short, if I do any kind of direct play, the playback is destined to fail, either immediately, or after a few minutes, and the only way to disable direct play is to switch to a unideal h264 level. Are plex working on a fix for this?
