I said LOOKS LIKE.
I didn’t go into detail about what it actually is, DID I ?
Well, I did ask what the issue WAS, not what it LOOKED LIKE.
I don’t actually know. I know it was fixed. whatever it was.
Ah, haha, ok. Thanks a ton for the help.
Hi there! I skimmed through this topic as there was lots of technical info that I did not entirely understand. I wanted to let the people in this thread know that I might have a similar issue. I have a Synology DS916+ which should be capable of hardware acceleration.
What I noticed in the last couple of weeks while watching movies on both my Shield Pro’s (haven’t used Plex in a while) is that certain high bitrate movies such as 4K Remux start stuttering and buffering when I use subtitles. English is not my first language so I almost always use subtitles. It doesn’t matter if it’s SRT or PGS. Sometimes my entire Plex Media Player just becomes uncontrollable and continues to play the movie stuttering and buffering for long periods. The entire interface doesn’t respond to my remote and after pressing the home and back button tens of times it either freezes or brings me back to the Android TV home screen. After reading through this thread I experimented with turning HW acceleration off in the server settings. Well, all playback issues have gone away. Is this normal?
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HW doesn’t do subtitle things very well - like almost not at all.
HW is built for smashing through high volumes of video frames.
HW can’t stop what it’s doing to convert, overlay, fiddle with - subtitles. It’s a complicated process HW has no time or skill for.
The CPU is built for that.
Ok, but I don’t see why there would be a transcode needed for .srt subtitles. I thought it would only hang at image based subtitles like PGS but it also seems to struggle with .srt for some reason. I’m starting to get confused as to what might be the culprit. I read in a different thread that TrueHD transcode in combination with subtitles doesn’t work well. What would be the reason for that?
Some clients require a transcode when using subs to keep the audio and video in sync. It’s complicated when some element of the stream won’t Direct Play.
Please reproduce and provide the android logs and server logs so we can check. The Shield should not need transcoded srt or pgs subtitles in most cases.
I have a Synology DS920 and suffered the same buffering problems as you. I used the workaround from @ChuckPa and it fixed the issue. I’ve tested videos using ASS and PGS subtitles and haven’t dealt with a buffering issue yet. I haven’t had any instability/crash issues like you mentioned, lucky me! I hope you continue to investigate the issue and find a solution. I’ll be monitoring this thread in case you do 
I remembered I used this workaround a long time ago when I couldn’t get hardware transcoding to work. I’m glad it is still available to use.
The logs as requested, let me know when you need me to reproduce specific actions.
LOG - Shield Pro.txt (4.7 MB)
Plex Media Server Logs_2021-07-08_20-00-24.zip (4.8 MB)
According to your log, the file is not being transcoded.
07-08 19:54:57.442 i: [MediaDecisionEngine] Decision: CanPlay: true CanDirectPlay: true CanDirectStreamVideo: true CanDirectStreamAudio: true CanDirectPlaySubtitle: true CanTranscodeSubtitle: false CanDisplayVideo: true
CanDirectPlay: true is the important part.
Would you be able to see why the video started stuttering like crazy? I played the same video in VLC on the same device and it played fine.
There’s not enough playback in your log. Please try playing again and wait for the stuttering to start. Let it play with the issue for about a minute, then grab a new Android log.
Alright, I made a new log and made sure to test a couple of movies and a show. The odd thing is that the behaviour is all over the place and doesn’t seem consistent, I tracked what happend too.
LOG - Shield Pro 2.txt (4.4 MB)
20:36 Playing the first episode of 11.22.63 “The Rabbit Hole” crashes Plex and brings me to the user selection menu
20:41 Start 1917 the movie, starts buffering from the start, shows on web app that it’s transcoding HEVC to H264
20:45 Turn off srt subtitles manually, starts direct playing 1917
20:49 Turn on psg subtitles
20:50 324Mbps local peak seen on Plex webapp
20:52 Stop watching manually
20:53 Start John Wick, sound starts stuttering, screen shows blur with lagging buffer ring
20:55 Starts playing without buffering or stuttering
20:56 Slight stutters in image and sound
20:56 More severe stutters which look like buffering but without the spinning ring
20:57 Freezes image and sound entirely
20:58 Starts playing again but with heavy stutter and buffering
20:58 Remote unresponsive to back and home button
20:59 Plex seems frozen
20:59 After repeatingly pressing home and back buttons it brings me back to the Android TV home menu
For 11.22.63, that file has SSA subtitles. There is an issue right now with that subtitle type.
1917 was transcoding due to the file having Dolby Vision. I’m not sure if the combination of dolby vision and subtitles is causing this.
John Wick, the app is indicating audio underrun, which means it’s not getting enough audio info in time. I cant tell why. I see that the file has 2 audio tracks. It’s possible the files were created incorrectly. Can you try remuxing the file with only the 1 audio track you want and see if that plays any better? If not, I’ll need the PMS logs during this playback to see if it logged any issues.
Double check in Web. That’s sort of the problem. Android isn’t handling SSA subtitles correctly.
07-08 20:36:25.601 i: [FF] SubtitleStream[2-ass] ASS (Advanced SSA) subtitle - Unknown Profile (text/x-ssa), 16,4 Mbps 80 min 0,00fps, No Title / dut (dut), 2 / 90 bytes, .
Am I doing something wrong here? I’m looking at SRT on web as well. Or is that because I’m on web on an Android phone?
Hmm. Can you post the XML info for that episode?
