yeah, it’s pretty high without hw decoding. vlc/mpc-hc is like 15-20%
Same here as well, mine is our dedicated plex server and our htpc in the theater room. I look forward to seeing if the app will get some of these bugs worked out for playback quality, as the wife approved ui is the plex a crossed all our devices like, roku, shield and android tv. so hoping one day to also have the same in the home theater room as well.
Why does PLEX HTPC works well and why does PLEX PLAYER occurs error, that after every show the playback stopps?
Apologies if this is a dumb question - I have looked through the thread but I’m not clear on the state of HDR support for the HTPC application. I have HDR enabled in Windows and my TV stays in HDR mode whatever I do in Plex - whether I’m playing SDR or HDR content.
Is it still not supported or should I be doing something to get it playing both types correctly?
Hi @nuuki1 - It is definitely being worked on. See Matt’s post back in March…
But unfortunately I don’t believe it’s been implemented just yet.
Understood - I guess the initial post would have been updated if it was done, but it wasn’t super easy to follow along so thought I’d double check.
So it sounds like as of right now there’s not an available Windows client that supports HDR - I’m sure its a top priority so fingers crossed we’ll see it before too long.
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There is a small issue with gamepad support. If HTPC is launched and then a gamepad is enabled the gamepad works as expected, but if the gamepad is connected before launching HTPC, the gamepad is unrepsonsive. This makes it annoying for playing a game first, and then wanting to Plex it up afterwards.
few notes based on my feedback
- while i see the need for large icons, some of us have large large screens. the ability to get more content on the screen would be very welcomed. just like in the web client the ability to ‘zoom the grid’ would be a nice change
- can we stop burying the limited vs full color range in a fairly undocumented mpv.conf file. according to the kodi black level article: Video levels and color space - Official Kodi Wiki having the player at ‘limited’ should be the default as it likely provides more outcomes with the correct color space compared to full
- still a very limited number of controls for those who want to tweak audio and video settings
- was there an overscan ability to set it properly not sure i saw it (granted i dont need it, but some may)
- the playback controls are super limited
- being able to see when the movie end time is (not like remaining time, but time of day it ends) on the playback bar is is a feature i love, would love to see it implemented
looks like it’s on the right track! will check back in a couple revisions. openPHT is the gold standard of what this should be
Likely it’s being recognized as a different device. SDL2 on Windows appears to be bad at recognizing devices present at start vs connected as the same device (it used to not even detect newly connected ones). The logs will tell you what device it is seeing and what actions are being taken on the device as you interact with the controller.
MPV does a pretty good job of detecting limited output and taking the appropriate action. With PMP I used to have to put this option in the mpv.conf file but with HTPC it appears to be correct without it. The output looks correct using the test pattern files mentioned in your link (the ones with the flashing black and white bars).
What specifically are you looking for? This statement doesn’t really say much of anything. A lot already have several key-bindings setup and you can change the key bindings too (check the markdown file present in the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Plex HTPC\inputmaps/~/Library/Application Support/Plex HTPC/inputmaps/ directory)
Already implemented: Settings → Experience → Show End Time for Video Playback.
It’s the wall-clock time of when the file ends.
irrelevant to what the player is detecting, some people consume on TVs and projectors, and need to set to limited to get the proper color space. not having to dive into a conf file and putting a tick box that writes a single line to a conf file seems pretty simple to develop. not everyone consumes on a PC monitor where full/full/full is likely ok to have
correct, this wasn’t a very well thought out piece of feedback on my part. sad however that someone would have to dig through another config file to find keybindings vs them being easily reviewed either in the interface or on a wiki page. however back to the actual topic, i suppose if you take away some of the fluff that openPHT had in terms of options, this has the barebones needed. maybe overscan might be necessary for some older displays as again, this is an HTPC version so it needs things regular desktop folks might not need. i cannot speak to how it handles audio with hdmi and optical devices in terms of settings.
missed! my bad, love it
some other feedback
- center channel boost (could go both ways on this as an option as you can modify this in other manners)
- full screen vs windowed full screen
- does it have proper 24p playback? havent had a chance to test
- an ability for people to skin/theme it would be awesome plex devs dont have to
- ability to hide descriptions from unplayed episodes
- ability to hide screenshots from unplayed episodes so only the cover art shows in case of spoilers
- if there is only one season in the show, go directly to that season rather than going to the season selection screen
coming along!
What the player is detecting is relevant because if it’s not wrong then you don’t need to set it anywhere. When I mentioned the above results and what it was detecting, that was with a TV as the display (and the same one when I mentioned having to set the mpv.conf option with PMP). I only mention the detection because I do recall seeing MPV performing detection in the logs.
There are already support documents made for HTPC but they aren’t public yet while the app is in a forum preview but if you really want such a doc here’s the one for PMP which is mostly correct for HTPC (though some of the commands are wrong): https://support.plex.tv/articles/216459997-create-your-own-inputmap/
I missed this the first time around but mpv.io is the documentation for this file. Additionally there is a markdown file next to the mpv.conf file location describing which options we override and also provides this link. I believe this too will have some support doc mention but don’t quote me on that.
Among what you’ve mention is missing I see center channel boost, limited color range, and overscan (which I’ve spoken on the evils of this before in this thread). It seemed to me from your original comment that you had a larger list in mind. Did I miss something?
Are you referencing a maximized window for the latter?
It can change the refresh rate to 23.976Hz if the display supports it and playback at that rate. Though some experience some stutter on occasion with refresh matching enabled which we are tracking down.
This can actually be set on the server in the editing the library section → Advanced → Seasons → Hide for single season series. The client respects this setting.
Upon inspection of the logs, in the failed case, the gamepad is detected twice in the initialization logs vs the expected 1 time if the gamepad is powered on after the program is loaded. I can upload my logs in each case if this warents further inquiry. The only other thing to note is that I run retroarch which also uses SDL2 for gamepad support I believe and this works as expected in both cases (obviously they could be using different versions and other factors could come into play so it’s not necessarily apples to apples).
This appears to be fixed in the latest version, ta. Perhaps I was further behind than I thought.
Edit: I was incorrect both about the exact problem and that it was fixed. See my reply below.
I think I found the cause, based on what you say. I think what happens is this:
I play some music. I pause the music (my remote has a pause button but not one that maps to the stop button) and back out to the main menu. I watch a TV show. I stop the TV show. The music is still sitting there in the corner, paused. I watch other films and TV shows. The music is still sitting there in the corner, paused.
Since pausing doesn’t count, it stops my display from sleeping, even if I haven’t even thought about that music for weeks. When the update installed it stopped that music session.
Perhaps have it not prevent sleep if the music is both paused and not the focus? Or even better, let it sleep the display if music is playing. For now I’ll navigate over to the stop button and make use of it, but the way this is currently handled feels unintuitive. In my opinion, pause shouldn’t prevent sleep in all cases and only video media actively playing should prevent display sleep.
The latest version of Plex HTPC has been crashing for me and I can’t seem to find the cause. In event viewer there is a generic error saying something along the lines of the Qt5Core.dll module is crashing. I watch 4k HDR content as well as 1080p and it doesn’t matter which I choose. After a few minutes it never fails to crash. Other apps do fine. Going to downgrade to 1.3.1 for now.
my problem may have arose from trying to delete the input mappings as the ds4 mappings were interfering with my existing controller setup. I deleted the input maps but now I realize there is a separate set of mappings in the appdata/local/plex htpc folder. I deleted those ds4 mappings as well to see if the issue resolves. all of this was done after a fresh install so hopefully it resolves it.
Ref. this post: Plex for Mac/Windows 1.34.1 Test Builds - #33 by gbooker02
Will Plex HTPC also get support for -egl?
Yes, the next version will have d3d11-egl for content that’s not 10-bit color. There is an issue with Qt using a version of ANGLE that’s 4 years old and thus not supporting 10-bit color in this format so this will fallback to dxva2-egl. You will see a blue frame briefly before it falls back. This is due to detecting this situation was just not possible reliably before it actually starts playback so it engaged the fallback right after playback starts.
The next version will also contain videotoolbox on the Mac so it won’t be using copy-back there either.
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Unfortunately I can’t get 1.4.1 to run stably. I have been using 1.3.1 because the latest version is just crashing after about 3 minutes of use
On stutter
Since many have asked about stutter they see in HTPC and not in PMP I wanted to comment on our findings in this area. The reasons behind this are long and entailed and I’d rather spend some time writing that properly before posting it here.
For some of you, the problem could be resolved with the no-copy hardware decoding that should be present in the next version. This will be particularly true of those on older hardware.
For the rest, if you experience stutter you may want to try turning off refresh rate matching. The issue is significantly more pronounced when there is a 1:1 ratio between the display refresh rate and the media framerate. A higher display refresh rate does alleviate the problem quite a bit.
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