I’ve converted a few test movies to be compatible with all of my devices. My Roku and Roku TV will Direct Play both 720p and 1080p just fine. However, My Android tablets will Direct Play the 720p but then have issues with the 1080p content. All files are encoded the same way.
The Android tablets will show in the Plex server that they are in fact Direct Playing, but the video will be frozen while buffering endlessly with the rare occasional blip of video actually playing, and eventually show an error due to limited connection/bandwidth. This, of course, makes no sense to me as bandwidth most certainly isn’t the issue in my house.
I’ve messed with all combinations of the Android client’s video quality settings, tried the default Android video player instead of ExoPlayer V2, and even told the individual movie file to convert on-the-fly as needed. The bizarre thing is that when manually setting the specific movie to convert automatically within the Android client, it will play back smoothly, but now transcodes (H.264>H.264 and AC3>AC3) instead of Direct Playing. The other strange thing is that the convert automatically setting had higher bandwidths (8mbps to 12mbps) - all while still transcoding and playing flawlessly - even though the Direct Play (6mbps to 7.5 mbps) continuously fails apparently due to the ever-ambiguous “your connection to the server is not fast enough.” Again, this makes no sense to me as the Direct Play was requiring less bandwidth, not to mention the 720p files are encoded the same way and don’t require pointless transcoding. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the higher resolution files want to act differently.
Please, please, please, somebody who knows what they’re doing far better than I do jump in and explain what I can do to get my (seemingly) properly encoded files to Direct Play on Android mobile!
