Pixel 8 pro, same here
OK everyone. I found a solution but you may not like it: EMBY. I installed it since Plex is just getting worse and worse and for some reason it Plays EVERYTHING in direct play mode on my Pixel 8 including EAC3+Atmos content. It even played a 4k remux with TrueHD+Atmos AND PGS subtitles in direct play! That’s witchcraft!
Any news? +1 per Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 9
@ChuckPa mentions a forthcoming server Forum Preview with a new transcoder here a few days ago, which I have my fingers crossed may include a fix/the required changes to for this to be resolved…but we’ll have to wait and see
Regarding ^^
I’m trying to figure out what’s going on
I thought I’d get time today to figure out why a whole bunch of known codecs don’t direct play but spent the day putting out 
It’s 2am here. Just now spinning down from the day.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
It would be easier if I had an Android mobile device – but I don’t.
Best I can do is with my shield or aftka (which is specialized for the TV)
Apologies, I wasn’t tagging you to chase up… it was only because you’d mentioned a Forum Preview for a new transcoder, which is the first mention of it that I’ve seen and giving a little hope that it something might be available soon-ish, that might help/resolve this issue
As I understand Pixels, even among the same model, their capabilities vary because of the firmware load by the device provider.
The biggest issue we have this week is that Engineering is unavailable.
( big off-site all-hands meeting ).
Transcoder upgrade won’t change the device’s capability/what it reports to PMS.
AFAIK pixels have relatively few firmware variations by provider - at least the newer (last 4years?) ones.
It was @BigWheel up-thread that said that an ffmpeg update was required to be able to correctly determine that these newer (Tensor based) Pixels cannot direct play EAC3 with Atmos and to transcode instead.
I’m certainly not asking for anything to be looked into right now, I assume the root issue is known at this point, rather, as mentioned, your comment on a transcoder forum preview brought me some hope
That might have been a bit miscommunicated .
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We did have to fix EAC-3 in the transcoder. That update was done recently.
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FFMPEG 6.1 is coming (nearing forum preview stage)
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As part of that, We’re also updating all the device capability profiles (base)
– the base is where the MDE (Media Decision Engine) determines what PMS thinks the device can play -
Each app is still responsible for telling PMS (which is passed to FFMPEG) what it can actually play
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When MDE and the App finish negotiating the actual HOW to play, then it’s played. ( this is usually a single message from the app followed by PMS responding with what is about to be sent )
There is so much coming with the new transcoder between major bug fixes, general upgrade improvements, and the new codec support.
I’ve been using an engineering build here for the past month or so.
To give you an idea of how much better it is –
- AV1 decode operating
- Playback start (the TV/player screen supplies video) down from 10-ish seconds to 2-3 seconds.
Chris has been super these past several months fixing the core and bringing us from FFMPEG 4 → the new 6.1 as well as the PMS fixes that accompany it.
Not sure if you noticed but the transcoder can now output HEVC. That was a fix in PMS and the existing transcoder. FFMPEG 6.1 does it natively so no rework will be needed there.
The entire code base for the transcoder was redone. (FFMPEG base + Plex additions) -versus- FFMPEG base w/ hand patches applied directly.
Please be patient with us. A lot has been done to get caught back up and move forward. It’s all about to be released (in the Forum Preview)
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cant test right now but wanted to flag it in this thread.
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I spun up a docker container instance and updated to the 1.41.8.9914-1d735f17b experimental release (the latest as of today; 1st July) and for my Pixel 8 Pro there is some improvement when compared to my non-docker Synology server (running latest Public Version 1.41.8.9834).
Some shows when played from the experimental docker server now report “Direct Play was attempted but failed, fallen back to transcoding”, where they just outright fail, as before, when attempted from the native Synology instance.
However it’s not all shows that do this, some still outright fail, as before.
Note: I’ve only had 15mins to do some quick tests; nothing exhaustive. And I’m also still using the older, pre-new UI, Android client version 10.26.0.2578
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