I have a widescreen 1080p version of LOTR which is a MKV file. It plays fine on my computer, but when I stream it through Plex Media Server to my 4k Sony Bravia tv, a colored line appears along the bottom of the video which is constantly moving and very distracting. It must have to do with the way Plex is automatically transcoding the file, but I dont have this issue with any of my other MKV video files. And, if i switch the quality from original, to 720p at 4mbps, the issue goes away.
I think converting the file to an mp4 could very well fix this, but I’m not positive of that. I want to convert the video losslessly to match quality, bit-rate, frame-rate etc. What is the best way to go about this? The video info on the file doesn’t show every bit of information, so if I put it into Premiere or something, I don’t know what to change every singe setting to.
Is there a program or player I can drop the file in to that will detect all of the video settings so that I can see what they are? (VLC doest seem to show all of them) Or, is there a converter that automatically detects all of these, then will set the export settings to the same so that I don’t have to do anything other than choose the file format I want to switch to?
Let me know what you guys think, Any help would be appreciated.
My own Sony gets that bar occasionally too – sometimes at the very bottom of the screen, sometimes somewhere in the lower third of the screen. Rebooting the TV usually fixes this.
Maybe you can give this a try before re-encoding your file.
Beyond that… things are not as straight forward as you describe them in your post. There’s basically 2 scenarios:
1. Re-Muxing
You basically keep the video and audio streams as-is but put them in a different container. If you’re familiar with the command line, you can do that e.g. using FFMPEG. There’s other apps that provide a graphical user interface (depends on your OS).
Re-Muxing is very fast as you don’t touch the content of the video at all.
However you’ll depend on the target container supporting your source material. As an example, MP4 does not support all video or audio codecs. If your source material is encoded as h264 or h265 you should be ok (same for audio if it’s AAC or AC3).
Also… simply re-muxing is unlikely to fix any compatibility issues with the player.
2. Transcoding
This will create a new encode of your source material. In this case, there’s no such thing as “lossless” transcoding. People usually do this if they’re dealing with a lower quality encoded source material (e.g. DVD sources which are encoded in MPEG1) or simply want to decrease the size of a file (a raw Blu-Ray source is usually ~20GB and can be decreased to 6-10GB while maintaining ok quality).
You can transcode videos e.g. using Handbrake. Handbrake also brings a set of presets that allow you to optimize the video to a specific target platform (e.g. certain versions of AppleTV that should also work with your TV).
Transcoding will take significantly longer. Also… no need to read information of the source material with another app.
When you say “rebooting your tv usually fixes this”, do you mean just turning it off with the power button, then turning it back on? Seems to me that unless that was resetting your tv to factory video settings or altering them in some way, that shouldn’t have any effect on that line…
I hadn’t really considered the issue being the tv itself, but suspected that it was the way Plex was transcoding it for the tv. I.e. if i were to alter the transcoding settings on my Plex account, that could do something. Especially since when i change the video setting to 720p while it is playing to the tv, that seems to eliminate the line.
I think I had the same problem with a couple of BluRay rips, particularly older BluRays
If I remember correctly, the video format was MPEG-2, and the video was interlaced (probably with a frame rate of 59,94 or 60 FPS). It didn’t affect all apps possibly because some deal with that type of video better than others.
The only resolution was to re-encode the video to AVC/h264. that’s probably why the colored line disappears when you lower the quality, because it is being transcoded by the server.
It’s worth a shot – at least you’re not loosing anything and save yourself the effort of re-encoding/transcoding the videos.
In my case the bar started occasionally showing up during Plex playback but also in regular TV mode.
A power-off with full re-boot of the Android TV used to fix it.
