Hello,
I have found that plex refuses to transcode one of my MKV files - no matter what quality I choose, video still plays as direct stream… All my other movies are behaving as expected. Logs and Mediainfo attached.
None of your log files shows a playback attempt of Deadpool.
You need to fetch the log files immediately after such a playback attempt.
Not before and not 6 restarts afterwards.
And why is no transcoding a bad thing? Transcoding slows down the server and reduces the quality.
Maybe you can provoke transcoding by activating a subtitle.
Some clients can also force a transcoding. Which one are you using?
Okay, second try with the debug logging enabled and proof that video is playing:
So what is the issue?
That it is trancoding or that it is not transcoding?
The above shows that it is indeed transcoding, and the reason is of course that the web app doesn’t support DTS audio.
Read my first post. Carefully look at the picture, especially lines Quality and Video.
When I set the quality in browser to 2 Mbps and plex happily direct streams at 15.5 Mbps, something is wrong.
Your logs don’t show that the client is passing along any bandwidth limits. You’ll need to enable logging in the Plex Web Player, recreate the issue, and provide this log.
Here you go. Enabled debug in web player settings, Played file, switched quality once just to be sure.
…Bump…
Sorry. Looking at this new log, I don’t see you playing Deadpool. I do see you playing Iron Man and it is correctly transcoding to 2 Mbps. I do see something that I didn’t notice before. You are using hardware accelerated transcoding which wasn’t shown before. I’m not sure if this has something to do with what you see, but since I don’t see the playback for Deadpool, I can’t tell.
Edit - Also, I asked for the log from Plex Web. You just provided the PMS logs. PMS will acknowledge what it was sent. In the case of Iron Man, it did get a quality value. If the problem is Deadpool, I’ll need the log from PlexWeb as well to see what it is sending to PMS.
Hi, my bad, I actually thought that the Web Player logs are upladed to PMS and are part of the zip package. Sorry. Attached is all the requested right after I tried to play the video.
Oh sorry. I didn’t notice this earlier. You need to turn on debugging logging for PMS. settings \ server \ general \enable plex media server debug logging
If you don’t see this option make sure you have “show advanced” turned on too.
From your web logs, it looks like it is working. But I need the PMS log with the debugging info to confirm.
Server logs w. debug logging enabled
Thanks. Something is wrong. PMS gets the command with the parameters setting the limit, but then doesn’t apply it for some reason.
This only happens on the 1 file? Can you provide me the XML for Iron Man so I can compare?
This happens with Deadpool only. Iron man XML attached.
A little bump here 
There’s nothing that stands out. The Deadpool XML is missing some info but nothing that should prevent it from being able to direct play. Can you make me a sample file, just a few minutes long, make sure it reproduces the problem, then provide me a link to that sample. I’ll need to pass this along to our transcoder expert and he’ll want a sample. Thanks.
Okay, funny thing has happened. I have split the file through MKVToolnix as per walktrough on Plex site, and that piece transcodes no problem. WTH? MKVToolnix remux should not touch the encoding, right?
Edit - this actually pointed me to the right direction - did the infamous Plex dance and file now transcodes no problem. I want to stress out that I have analysed the file several times just to make sure everything got picked.
I am attaching “new” xml, could you plese tell me what was the cause?
I don’t see anything in that xml that would explain your issue. The only thing I see different is there appears to be 2 additional srt files. I really have no clue what could have caused what you were seeing.
