it appears many (probably thousands) of Plex users are experiencing the exact same playback issue (crash) when playing on the Plex App of their Smart TV.
The playback issue occurs when reaching the end of the content watched and occurs every time when watching from a Smart TV.
If I need to guess, it occurs around the 95% playtime. Around the time most content start showing credits, almost start showing them, or just started showing them a minute ago.
Some users report the issue as being intermittent, but I belief that’s a false claim as most will end content at the credits and when credits are longer the issue might appear during credits.
The fact that this occurs for so many users, only on Smart TV’s and 100% of the time it should be easy to troubleshoot.
For me, the issue only started occurring recently when I installed my brand new DS223 and configured it to be my new Plex Media Server. However, the OP on Reddit is 2 years old… Keep in mind that this has also been seen on QNAP servers. It could be a combination of sever + player, where server = NAS and player = Smart TV.
When I have the subtitles on, I get a playback error: “Playback Error: Conversion Failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.” near the end of the affected episodes around the time when the end credits start.
Subtitles work fine throughout the episode until I get to the Playback Error. The episode(s) where I experience this error have ASS subtitles. When I extract the subtitles to an external .srt file and use those, I get no error. When I turn off the subtitles, I get no error.
The settings in the TV’s Plex client are set to never burn subtitles. There is no playback error when playing the same thing on the Plex client on my laptop.
Hopefully this information will help someone find a solution to this error.
I have also noticed a lot of threads that have experienced similar problems
Here are some examples:
It seems like this is a big issue that is happening to a lot of people. It seems to occur commonly during anime episodes because those have subtitles. I am not completely sure about this but it might be happening when the subtitles end.
It’s a known problem by Plex and they are looking into it. I really hope they fix it soon.
My workaround is adding a last subtitle line near the end of the serie/movie/anime so if it ends at 25:00 i’ll add a line around 24:55-24:56 so I know that the glitch will happen far beyond the end of the content.
I just watched an anime episode with ASS subtitles after the end credits and I got the “Playback Error: Conversion Failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.” after the episode ended. Now I am even more confident that the issue is related to the subtitles ending.
I’ve also heard from a friend that uses my server suggest that this kind of issue could be connected to the use of subtitles (webOS and Plex web).
I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ve encountered such problems when using external subtitles (i.e. not the embedded ones), so I wonder if extracting the subs into srt files would also serve as a workaround for the issues in question. I’ve read that Bazarr allows you to automate the extraction process.
Watched an episode last night and ended with “Playback Error: Conversion Failed" at the end without even running the full ending credits. And we went to sleep.
Same happening to me on LG TV. I got used to it on Tizen (Samsung OS) but this one is already full of other bugs. However on LG everything works great, except this error happening probably since the last 2 or 3 official PMS update (Windows). I can confirm the subtitle trick works, but if I may add, subtitles are not a “secondary” kind of feature. This is a critical feature. Hopefully some Plex dev will eventually work on this, as it is the kind of bug which tarnishes the whole user experience.
Hey indeed it is the same issue, but I don’t think your thread is the first either. Anyway, great to know they’re acknowledging it and working on it!
Yes, it’s not the first, but it’s definitely reported earlier than this one And I provided a bit detailed pre-analysis to bring developers’ attention and get this fixed in timely manner
I can confirm that after extracting the subtitle .srt files with Bazarr, the issue doesn’t seem to occur anymore. Just another workaround I wanted to mention.
And I provided a bit detailed pre-analysis to bring developers’ attention and get this fixed in timely manner 