well, it finally happened. the dreaded ““improved”” app has been pushed to the Play Store for everyone! and with it, i can no longer direct play various codecs that i was able to before. here’s a list:
AV1
HEVC Main 10
H264 High 10
HEVC RExt
VC-1
Xvid
FFV1
server version: 1.41.6.9685
client version: 2025.14.0 (966828378)
direct play is enabled, and i have ensured that it is not the subtitle format or the audio causing it. my mobile device is a Moto G75 on Android 15. the previous android version of Plex could play all of these without transcoding.
AV1 is supported in latest version… on Apple TV at least.
i think i remember there was a thread where AV1 (or HEVC? i forget) direct play was broken on the apple version, but that was fixed in a recent update. seems like it hasn’t been fixed on Android yet
It’s working fine in both the Preview Experience 2025.15.0 and App store 8.45 for me. When I first installed 2025.15.0 it didn’t display that it had been upgraded and I had to delete and re-install from testflight and was fine after.
I have stereo gen 2 homepods. the audio is AAC (or HE-AAC), but they direct play in the old app and in version 2025.8.2. But every update after that (for the new app), it transcodes the video (HEVC Main) and direct streams the audio. If I turn SRT subtitles on, it hardcodes them.
i tried two codecs of the same episode - AV1 and HEVC High 10. if you CTRL+F “Professional Childhood Friend Yanami Anna’s Style of Losing” in Plex Media Server.log you can find those
yes that is correct, but the device i am playing the file back from - my Moto G75 android phone, DOES support AV1, and thus should be direct playing this file. it should NOT be transcoding this.
i can’t find anything that directly states it has AV1 hardware decoding, but i’m assuming the software decoding is what was being used prior to this new Plex update, as it was able to direct play all of the formats mentioned in my initial post.
AV1 needs HW decode. It needs it as much as HEVC needs HW decode
prior to this new plex update, the playback performance seemed fine, at least on my device. most of my AV1 content is 1080p, 24fps though so that’s probably not as demanding as a 4K title
While not great, can you get by with not using AV1
at the moment i can’t really direct play the majority of my media. the vast majority of it is either x264 10-bit or HEVC 10-bit, which, as i stated, does not direct play on this new plex update.
AV1 was highly appealing to me given its good quality at lower bitrates, especially for a mobile device as the quality hit for those types of encodes is almost indistinguishable on a phone screen. not having the option to direct-play via software decoding would be a pretty huge disappointment.
I’m not aware of any published AV1 titles.
i’ve personally encoded some of my media to AV1 - i am also not aware of any official AV1 titles
Are you aware of / do you have ADB ?
If you have the older APK, you can uninstall and then side-load (using ADB) the older APK
i have APKs of the last version of Plex prior to the new UI update, so i will likely downgrade to this until more bugs have been ironed out and features are re-implemented
I"m sorrry about this. I don’t have any android devices other than my Shield (completely different player engine) so reading the logs would need to be done by them.
If you want to download the current player logs and then switch (downloading player logs after) – it might show them where the regression occurred .
