Portrait videos play blown up to Landscape. Suggestions to fix?
Hello. Thank you for helping. So to clarify each video that I have in portrait plays massively distorted and expanded to landscape view. Additionally the videos are NOT just rotated incorrectly. This only recently started happing a few months ago. Videos play distorted on the Roku Plex app for tv and the Plex app for iPad and the Mac OS Plex web interface. All the portrait videos play correctly when viewed with Quicktime or any other video player on my Mac.
Check your quality playback settings in the Plex client. There’s a setting to automatically adjust quality. How are your quality settings configured?
Thanks for trouble shooting this with me. For the life of me I cant find those settings? Your referring to settings on my mac in the plex client? Can you tell me where to look? Thanks
Here are the screen shots of my quality settings on ipad pro. Basically they are all currently set at play original. However… I did some trouble shooting. 4k portrait videos (aka height taller than width) and conversion seems to be at least one of the reasons. If they play at original quality they play correctly. However if the video gets converted to a lower 1080p quality then the portrait video plays blown up and incorrect. All 4k videos get converted on ipad regardless of my settings (because I gander they figure ipad pro doesn’t do 4k anyway). And all videos over 20 mbps get converted to lower quality (not original) as well. And again, when ever it gets converted it plays incorrect. That is what I think is going on here. As far as I can tell.
So basically any 4k or long 1080p portrait video plays incorrect. Conversion seems to be the culprit. All my home videos are shot in 4k these days so I have to fix.
On the Mac/Web I cant find any fix. Settings are set to “play original quality” on all settings - direct play, direct stream, and html5 player.
Please help. Looking at video info I find this… All portrait videos have reversed width and height. They SHOULD be Width 2160 Height 3840. But each portrait video shows Width 3840 Height 2160 in its metadata. So when played it stretches the video wide.
@ewwatson said:
So basically any 4k or long 1080p portrait video plays incorrect. Conversion seems to be the culprit. All my home videos are shot in 4k these days so I have to fix.
On the Mac/Web I cant find any fix. Settings are set to “play original quality” on all settings - direct play, direct stream, and html5 player.
There is no such thing as 4K in portrait. You basically have an 8k video that has the sides cut off. You will not be able to direct play these videos. The transcoder can’t produce 4K video, so the best you will get is 1080 height and 608 width, which I don’t know if the transcoder is designed to handle either. I’ll check if the transcoder should be able to handle this. Can you create me a short 5-10 second video and upload it somewhere for me to grab so I can test it?
In the meantime, don’t take 4k video in portrait. Nothing can play this in full resolution anyways so might as well leave the camera in landscape.
I’m having the same problem, any video rec on my Iphone on portrait, is been show distorted/blow up (basically it is stretching the video sideways instead of adding the black bars on the side)
Funny thing, 2 or 3 updates before, the same would happen, but when you would pause the video go on the play settings (not there anymore on the latest version of plex) and switch between any quality set and back to original, and went back and resume playing the video it would go to the right format.
Speaking as a former film production guy, might I suggest you stop shooting video in portrait? There is a reason TV sets and Monitors and Movie Screens are landscape.
@MovieFan.Plex said:
I just learned that the devs were aware of this issue. A fix is being worked on to use the proper height and width.
Good, it seems all my old videos shot vertically on an iPhone are showing this behavior. Here is the MediaInfo file information:
Writing application : 5.0.1
Writing library : Apple QuickTime
Model : iPhone 4
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L3.1
Format settings : 1 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, RefFrames : 1 frame
Format settings, GOP : M=1, N=30
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
@tramp78 said:
Speaking as a former film production guy, might I suggest you stop shooting video in portrait? There is a reason TV sets and Monitors and Movie Screens are landscape.
We almost got to that point after the initial barrage of vertical video around the time of iPhone 4 and then Snapchat happened so good luck with that
“Speaking as a former film production guy, might I suggest you stop shooting video in portrait? There is a reason TV sets and Monitors and Movie Screens are landscape.”
Right. Unfortunately I’m not the only one in the fam that shoots vids.
Good news though the devs seem to have fixed this issue with last update. Thanks guys!!!
I am still experiencing this problem on the roku plex app. I.e. Old home videos shot in portrait / vertical orientation are scrambled but all landscape videos play normally.
Was it just the IOS / Android apps that were updated?
Also, we’ll probably need a sample, so can you create a short 30-60 second clip, confirm it has the problem, then upload it somewhere you can share me a link.
