Plex App gives Black Screen on PS3

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
1

Good afternoon,

I’m beginning a home theater setup using Plex and a PS3. I do understand that the PS3 is rather old and I’ve read the app support generally isn’t as good because of that. However, there are some strange things are happening on my setup.

Before I found Plex, I used the basic Media Server with Windows Media Player (windows 7). I have used Handbrake to create files for several movies and TV shows, all of which worked great on my PS3. Some videos had to be recoded a couple of times, but in the end all was good. But I heard about Plex and installed it, got the App for the PS3, and roughly half of the videos I have show a black screen, but have perfect audio. The other half play great.

For summary, I used pretty standard Handbrake settings: MP4, quality setting 20 for DVD, 24 for HD content, High profile at 4.0. Some files are in AAC, some are in AC3, since I was experimenting for personal preference.

After some searching, I turned off the Direct Play/Stream option, and the PS3 app could now play everything, but quality suffered greatly on some items. But I figured I shouldn’t have to do this; I’m withing the PS3 specs. And, the separate Plex Media Server plays everything great. There’s no correlation I can find as to which videos I have work, and which do not. For example, the App can’t play the original DVD Futurama episodes, but the recent HD ones are no problem. Also in HD, The first two Harry Potter movies do not work, but the third does.

The only thing I can think of is that the ones that work are mostly live-action, and the ones that don’t are mostly animated.

Is there something I’m missing, or would it be better to move to another set-top box like a PS4 or something?

Thanks!
Mike

2

In case anyone was curious, I did find an answer and cause: it’s the Animation setting in Handbrake.

For some reason that I’m not sure of, whenever I record a video using the Animation preset in Handbrake, the PS3 Plex app is unable to properly stream the video. When I recorded the Simpsons Movie, it gave me a black screen when I used the Animation setting, but changing the setting to None when recording allowed Plex to stream it properly. Unfortunately, on my TV, there is a slight noticable improvement using the Animation setting, so I might not sacrifice that here. At least there’s an answer.