Plex crashing and failing to play video (Android TV)

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 1.22.3
Player Version#: 8.16.2

I’m currently having two issues with the latest Plex update on Android TV, both of which I never experienced before.

The first is that the entire Plex app would crash & restart if I attempt to play a video that has embedded VOBSUB subtitles. This seems limited to VOBSUBs for now since other image bases subs, such as embedded PGS, play just fine.
Log here:
VOBSUB Crash.txt (1.2 MB)

The second issue is that Plex now refuses to play anything with a DTS 5.1 track. When a I try to play a file, it first looks like its loading, PMS says its direct playing, but then a message appears on my TV saying “An error occurred while attempting to play this video. Please check your connection and try again”. Changing passthrough to ‘none’ (from HDMI) does not solve the issue and results in the exact same message.
Log here:
DTS failure.txt (1.3 MB)

I just wanted to re-iterate here that both use-cases worked fine (direct-playing even) on my TV in the past and nothing has changed in my setup apart from Plex being updated here so there’s definitely something going on under the hood and I’d appreciate if this can get looked into. (Also, the issues only occur on Android TV, on my Android phone both files direct-play without issue)

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This issue (though on a different client version) was raised by another forum user yesterday; a Plex employee was able to reproduce the problem and are working on a fix.

Regarding your DTS playback failure, this seems suspicious:

05-11 18:32:47.003  i: [ExoPlayer][EventLogger]       [X] Track:0, id=1, mimeType=audio/vnd.dts, bitrate=1536000, codecs=dts, channels=6, sample_rate=48000, language=english, supported=YES
...
05-11 18:32:48.911  i: [FFmpeg] [WARN] [dca @ 0x8b45f400] Channel layout '7.1' with 8 channels does not match specified number of channels 6: ignoring specified channel layout

It seems as though the MKV container suggests 6-channel audio is present, while FFMPEG detects 8-channel audio. It could be completely innocuous; however, that logging leads up to this:

05-11 18:32:49.327  e: [ExoPlayer][EventLogger] playerFailed [eventTime=31.48, mediaPos=0.00, window=0, period=0
  com.google.android.exoplayer2.ExoPlaybackException: Plex.Audio.Renderer error, index=2, format=Format(null, null, null, audio/raw, null, -1, null, [-1, -1, -1.0], [6, 48000]), format_supported=NO
      at com.google.android.exoplayer2.o0.handleMessage(SourceFile:43)
      at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:102)
      at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:193)
      at android.os.HandlerThread.run(HandlerThread.java:65)
  Caused by: com.google.android.exoplayer2.audio.AudioSink$InitializationException: AudioTrack init failed 0 Config(48000, 252, 196992)

It may be worth your time to ensure you mux-ed in the audio track you intended to (or set the track properties as intended).

3

Thanks for the update relating to my first issue. I’m also experiencing the exact same issues as that user so good to hear it’s been worked on.

Regarding the second one, the suggestion you made did not work. Still the same behaviour.

I added a video file with an un-altered 8-channel DTS-HD MA audio, same result as explained above. Now usually, I must reduce a DTS HD track back to its core since for some reason Plex keeps assuming my soundbar can play these tracks (it can’t due to ARC bandwidth limits :confused:) leading to no audio during playback. So, I also tried using mkvtoolnix to get the core dca track and mux the new file. This also did not work resulting in the same behaviour.

Let me just add, that this is happening to every single video with a DTS track in my library. And that many of these videos are ones that I have watched through Plex on this exact device before with zero issues. This leads me to think that there’s something wrong on Plex’s end here as nothing changed on my side.

4

So typically I have to remux 8 channel DTS-HD twice with MkvToolnix in order to get the actual 5.1 core track. The first time looks like it works, but you’ll notice that the DTS stream size is way too large. I don’t have this issue with the 6 channel DTS-HD tracks though.

Another thought would be to re-analyze your videos as an improper analysis server side could have happened at some point.

5

Re-analysing my videos would make sense if it were just a couple vids, but its literally every video with a DTS track. And I already did the re-analysis a couple weeks ago for my entire library due to unrelated reasons, either way it doesn’t work.

Also, I have a quite diverse mix of videos (in terms of sources). Most videos have a DTS track reduced to core via eac3to. Some videos contain a straight-up unaltered DTS-HD track, and a small number of recent videos contain DTS tracks reduced to core via mkvtoolnix.

Either way, if this due to my editing with mkvtoolnix/eac3to, then the videos with the DTS-HD tracks should’ve worked as is, but they don’t in same way the others don’t.

6

Okay, I’ve managed to solve both my issues that I originally listed in my post: that being Plex crashing when playing a video with embedded VOBSUBs and Plex refusing to play anything with a DTS track (including DTS tracks untouched from MakeMKV) on my Android TV.

The fix was pretty simple, and I can’t believe I didn’t try it earlier because it’s what I always try first when an app misbehaves on my phone.

All I had to go to when long press on the Plex app icon whilst in the homescreen, click on app info, force stop the app then clear data before relaunching the app and signing in again. And that’s it. Somehow the exact videos I was having problems with are now working just fine (all direct-playing).

This was the behaviour I experienced before the latest few Plex updates so I’m not sure what went wrong or what clearing the data did to fix it but hey it works.

But unfortunately, it’s not all roses as in doing so I discovered a new issue (which I suspect is related to this one relayed to me by @pshanew above) whereby if I try to play a video that has embedded VOBSUBs and at the same time require audio transcoding (multi-channel aac :unamused:), then Plex would just crash and restart. If I turn off the subs, then the video launches fine, and audio is transcoded no problem.

I’d appreciate if we could hear an update on this issue since I checked the post that’s linked and there hasn’t been an update from Plex staff since that initial reply 15 days ago. Thanks all for your attempts to help!

EDIT: Upon further digging, it appears the reason why DTS tracks failed to play on Plex on my Android TV is because I had turned on the ‘Refresh Rate Switching’ option. What? How? Why? I’m pretty confused by this one and I’m pretty sure it’s replicable too. Take a video with a DTS track, try to play it on a Sony Android TV set with Plex and you should see the same behaviour I’m seeing. I don’t think the ‘Refresh Rate Switching’ option ever did anything on Sony Android TVs anyways so I’ve left that off but would appreciate an explanation into this.

7

Still exists in version 8.18.0.25332. I bumped the referenced thread. Hopefully Plex has some updated info available.

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