Plex on Android fire TV

General Discussions
1

Hi,

I love Plex and have been using it for a number of years. However I have a problem that has resulted in a bout of alopoetia due to my head scratching over this issue. Permit me to elaborate…

I have 5 devices which are network attached to the same Plex (plex pass latest update) server running under a Windows 8.1 VM. I can play the same movie on devices 1,2 & 3 but on devices 4 & 5 they fail with “An error occured while attempting to play this video… please crack open another bottle while you try to figure this out”.

My gut suggests this is an Amazon update issue however I have no evidence to support this and as you can see below Plex plays it on my 3rd Fire TV, although it is a 4k device.

Any ideas, please?

1, Amazon fire 4kTV AOK
2, PC AOK
3, Android phone AOK
4, Amazon fire TV NAOK
5, Amazon fire TV NAOK

Regards, Des (perate)

2

please post

  • the XML info of the movie
  • the cpu type in your server
  • the number of cpu cores you allowed this VM to use
  • the amount of free space on the system volume of this VM

the Plex Media Server.log with time stamps at least from 1 minute before and after a playback attempt will also be helpful.
Enable “debug logging” first (not ‘verbose’, please).

3

Hello and thanks for your response!

Apologies for my delayed response.

XML attached as ZIP including before & after logs
Server Physical CPU = Intel i7-3770 @3.4ghz
5 vCPU processors allocated to VM
47.2gb free space available (single virtual drive) on SSD

Thanks in advance :)>-

4

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated …

5

Is this a Sony BluRay? It looks like that.

Have you tried to pick one of the AC3 audio tracks, instead of the TrueHD audio?

What did you set as the upper limit for bitrate? In your logs it shows a ridiculous resolution of 420x236 pixels.

6

Huge thanks OttoKerner! With this info I’ve made real progress.

So, switching to AC3 seems to have given me a foothold at least, well sort of. Of the two available AC3 tracks one was audio plus commentary and the 2nd track was commentary alone. Switching to any non-AC3 audio tracks also failed (all failures were DTS 5.1 or DTS-HD 5.1 or trueHD) It seems as though DTS/truHD is no longer playable by my two Amazon fire TV devices. It’s a little conspiracy theory-ish I know but could it be a deliberate ploy to sell more of the 4k units? As i see it, i need to re-encode from originals or upgrade to 4k players.

With my limited experience i may be missing a trick here but I don’t see any other options for me :frowning: sob sob

7

Do you have your media stored as mkv?

To get normal AC-3 out of Dolby TrueHD, DTS or DTS-HD you can use the free tool eac3to. It includes everything you need to recode the audio. It does a great job.

Assuming you have eac3to downloaded and extracted to C:\Program Files\eac3to\ open a command prompt and cd into that directory. Then run the following command:

eac3to.exe "C:\Here is my movie with TrueHD.mkv"

It will now show you each stream (video, audio, subtitle, etc.) and its format in that video file. Your TrueHD stream should be number 2 (while video is number 1). Now run the next command to actually transcode the audio:

eac3to.exe "C:\Here is my movie with TrueHD.mkv" 2:"C:\This is my newly transcoded audio.ac3"

eac3to is intelligent and transcodes your audio into the format specified by the file extension. The above command would transcode into AC-3 with 640 kbps (because the source had a higher bitrate). If you want a lower bitrate for the audio just add eg -448 at the end of the command.

You also can transcode all the audio stream at once:

eac3to.exe "C:\Here is my movie with TrueHD.mkv" 2:"C:\This is my newly transcoded audio.ac3" -448 3:"C:\This is my newly transcoded audio_commentary.ac3" -448

8

Thanks An3k, Yes, I am using MKV containers. This though, sounds like it could work for me. I’ll give this a try. :-h