Server Version#: 1.20.1.3252
Player Version#: 8.6.0.20351
I appear to have the opposite problem of what most HEVC transcoding posts are about.
I have a Sony KDL-55W800C that does not support HEVC / h265 however when I play media that is encoded in this format, Plex tries to Direct Play (according to the dashboard) which results in garbled video.
The same media correctly Direct Plays on my phone (also Android), and is also correctly transcoded to H264 when playing via my iPad.
On the Sony TV I can usually select to view the media in lower quality and have it transcode successfully, although approx 20% of the time the audio goes out of sync when doing this.
My most reliable workaround for this so far is to define Optimised Versions so that the media is pre-transcoded however I’d rather fix the root cause which I’m assuming is the Plex client telling the Plex server that the Sony TV supports HEVC when it does not.
Actually, it’s your device that tells the app that it supports HEVC. If you can provide the log from the app after a restart of the app and playing back an hevc file. We should be able to see what’s going on.
Thats the part I find weird, because the log also shows HEVC not supported by the Video decoder, then it Direct Plays anyway (I’ve deleted the Audio decoder lines from below);
09-30 20:43:52.109 i: [TranscodeSession] Updating session status
09-30 20:43:52.137 i: [FF] Video decoder doesn’t support hevc (video/hevc).
09-30 20:43:52.137 i: [FF] Video decoder doesn’t support hevc (video/hevc).
09-30 20:43:52.137 i: [FF] Video decoder doesn’t support hevc (video/hevc).
09-30 20:43:52.174 i: [TranscodeSession] Direct Play
09-30 20:43:52.748 i: [ExoPlayer][EventLogger] decoderInitialized [6.78, 0.00, window=0, video, OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.HEVC]
Here is the XML for that file 54888.xml.txt (3.1 KB)
Your file is 10-bit HEVC. Plex doesn’t convert down to 8-bit so this is what happens when you try playing 10-bit video on a TV that doesn’t support 10-bit. There isn’t a fix until PMS can convert down to 8-bit. It is a feature request and something Plex is interested in adding, but I have no info on when that might happen.
