When I watch Live TV remotely on my android phone, it will direct play if the quality settings are equal to/or greater than the source resolution ignoring the streaming brain bandwidth restrictions I set. So If I’m watching a channel that broadcasts at 720p and I have my “remote streaming” quality set to 2mbps (720p). It will direct play and buffer because it’s direct playing. I checked the server & dash and it is indeed direct playing which is requiring way more upload bandwidth than my ISP currently provides. I only see this on android mobile as it works correctly in other plex clients like web, iphone, PMP)
On my server I have my “internet upload speed” set to 6mbps so it shouldn’t allow direct playing. If I watch a recording, it works and the server transcodes as it should so it’s only Live TV that has the issue.
This was an issue for a long time on android mobile, then when they upgraded the player a few months back it worked. It has since resurfaced over the last few updates, don’t know exactly when.
I didn’t provide logs, but can if needed. It should however be very easy to reproduce.
UPDATE:
I downgraded to 8.0.2 and the issue goes away. When I tried 8.1 and anything later, it doesn’t work.
What bitrate is the actual content? Your screenshot shows it is direct playing so the client must think the actual live bitrate is less than 2. Can you provide the log from the app after recreating this issue?
Upgraded android client to 8.2
Then I stopped and started Plex Media Server
Started Live TV stream around 9:37 pm
Started recording channel 11.1 so I could capture actual bitrate under media info (Which shows 14336 kbps for a 720p stream which is obviously way above the 2mbps limitation set on the phone, or even the 6mbps upload set on the server. )
The playback is choppy/unplayable and dash reports it’s direct playing. If I playback the recording, it transcodes and plays fine.
Downgrade back to 8.0.2 and play the same Live TV channel with all the same settings and it plays fine and server reports it’s transcoding as expected.
Thanks for the log. I see what is going on. I’ll bring this up with the Android team.
What is happening is that neither PMS nor the app is able to analyze the live stream to identify the bitrate to be able to apply the limits. The app then erroneously thinks that since the bitrate is not above the current limit, it should be able to direct play the file and does.
Hey there. I am having the excact same problem with Live Tv transcoding. LiveTV not transcoding (fireTV and native android).
Transcoding worked fine since Android version 7.30 but did stop working with version 8.0.2.
As mentioned before, this is only happening if the source quality (720p) and the “remote streaming” quality (720p) are the same. When changing the “remote streaming” quality to 480p transcoding works fine.
It’s really appreciated to finally have a Team Member look into this issue
Don’t hold your breath. This hasn’t worked for years! I had a previous thread regarding the same issue that went on for over a year. It finally got fixed when they re-vamped the app on android but then broke with the 8.2 update, and still remains broken!
Android Beta 8.6.0.19962 fixed this issue in some ways for me.
With this update transcoding to the “remote streaming” qualtity works again.
What doesn’t seem to work is to change the playback qualtity in the playback settings while watching Live TV. For e.g. if I have set my “remote streaming” qualtity to 4mbps, start the Live TV playback (transcoding to 4mbps is working), and then want to change my playback quality to 2mbps in the playback settings. Plex loads for a couple of seconds and then jumps right back to direct play instead of transcoding to 2mbps.
