Server Version: 1.32.4.7195 Player Version: 5.62.0
Because Samsung sucks and doesn’t support DTS/TrueHD, all of my media has to be (audio) transcoded now. But none of the movies actually work; they’ll all just randomly stop, get stuck and after a few minutes timeout with the “An unexpected playback problem occurred” error message. Scrubbing doesn’t work either.
I used to manually convert my movies before watching (ffmeg -c:v copy -c:a aac) until one day I found out that disabling (SRT) subtitles fixes the issue.
To be honest it’s not even strictly related to audio transcoding, I just wrote that in the title because that’s the obvious way to notice it. It also happens when sending “Direct Play”-able content over the internet to a Samsung Smart TV (which the transcoder will turn into DASH). Disabling subtitles will help there as well.
I don’t really expect any help here – this is more of an attempt to help users looking for those keywords and tell them the workaround. It only happens in the Samsung Smart TV client and my iOS/Android devices and PCs are not affected.
I can confirm some of my friends using Samsung aren’t able to play some files.
It looks like whenever a subtitle is enabled this error occurs. For some reason the subtitle track gets “Direct Stream”.
The playback either doesn’t start at all or just stops playing after a while…this is weird.
All this with Direct-Play content, with SRT subtitles included in MKV.
It shows both Video and Audio as Direct Play, while Subtitles (SRT) are Direct Stream. Why would they need to be Direct-Stream-ed?
It also happens with PGS subtitles (these Samsung apparently have PGS support, so no transcoding is happening).
I hope this gets some attention, it would be nice at least having other people confirming this problem or not.
I have this same problem with my Samsung TV. It is rather annoying and it seems to be related to srt subtitles. My logs seem to have following lines:
[TranscodeOutputStream] Delaying subtitle output to wait for video stream to catch up
That doesn’t really make sense, since video was playing before it stopped to buffer.
What I tried so far (so nobody wastes their time trying the same):
Downgrade: I’m positive that this isn’t a regression because I went as far back as 1.24.2.4973 (September 2021) and it was still happening. I couldn’t go further because my Plex client was complaing about “missing codecs” regarding my test case but I’m sure earlier versions behave the same.
Prepare audio: I also tried converting my incompatible audio tracks to AAC and rewriting the Plex Transcoder to use that instead of generating them from scratch but that didn’t help either. It’s not related to audio transcoding but audio transcoding triggers it (i.e. not using Direct Play).
IIRC Plex sends the DASH stream and SRT subtitle separately and I think it just desyncs for whatever reason (it’s deterministic). I would even bet that there’s a command line option that prevents that (AFAICT Plex Transcoder will keep generating DASH segments). But I have no idea how to even approach this so let’s hope Plex devs do something about this.
I arrived to this thread because I have the same problem. Samsung TV (2022 model), latest plex running on docker with GPU transcoding.
Movie or TV show plays fine until a few minutes later it just “freezes” (spinning circle on the screen as if loading). If I go back to Home and continue playing, it will do it again in a few minutes. Until you give up because this is not a nice way to watch a movie. From what I can tell, this happens only if audio needs to be transcoded but video is on direct play.
Workaround is to disable subtitles and then it will work without a problem (but I want the subtitles!)
How do you disable subtitles globally? Do you just do it on a file by file basis? Everytime I play something it attempts to put on English-Forced subtitles but I see no option to turn off subtitles completely for the client, only on a file by file basis before I go to watch something.
