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I have a Roku Premier that supports MPEG2 (3920X). When direct playing MPEG2 DVR recordings, it plays fine but when I try to seek, playback jumps back to the beginning. Seeking works when direct streaming, but I would like to avoid unnecessary writing to disk.
I also have some MPEG2 blu-rays that cause some blocky pixelation during playback. I’m not sure if this is due to slower wireless in the Premier or if the Roku cannot handle the 1080P bitrate for MPEG2.
Does anyone have experience with the Ultra model to know if either of these issues would be resolved with this better Roku model? Thanks.
When forcing Direct Play - it behaves as you describe.
When leaving Direct Play in Auto - the streams are remuxed to HLS - not technically Direct Play, but Direct Steam with nothing more than a remux - and I can FF anywhere I want.
Do you see that as well?
BTW:
If there’s a difference to the CPU in a Direct Stream and a Direct Play - I can’t see it:
Thanks for testing on the Ultra. I get the same behavior on the Premiere. Yes, remux is not a big deal other than the unnecessary writing to disk that I would like to avoid.
Does it?
I have no idea how that works, neither am I worried about it - my database and all Plex goodies are on a local HDD - so if it’s writing something - I don’t need to know about it…lol
This is the reason we do not Direct Play. The Roku does not seek TS containers properly, so at best, we have to remux. MPEG2 is not officially supported, but it does work in most cases while remuxed, which is why we added the advanced toggle. Note that it does tend to work a bit better on Roku TVs, most likely since they need to support it for OTA signals.
Thanks. Do you have any idea about the blu-ray 1080p MPEG2 pixelation issues? If I let it “Direct Stream (throttled)” it still pixelates so I am suspecting it might be a playback limitation in the Premiere.
Yeah, from what we can tell the support for MPEG2 is somewhat unpredictable. In most cases a Roku TV platform will handle MPEG2 better than other Roku models, most likely due to the requirements to support OTA signals.
I also had this problem on my Roku’s (Ultra and stick). I didn’t have many movies in that format (mostly stuff from the early 2000’s), so I finally just gave in and encoded those to high-quality HEVC 10-bit while copying the audio track. They work great now, visual quality is still extremely high at 1/3 the file size, and I have the old movies archived on an external drive in case MPEG2 works better sometime in the future. But I feel your pain on this one.
Is there a way to save different Playback Settings per title? If I turn off Enable Direct Stream for these 1080P MPEG2 titles it transcodes so that playback is OK, but when I re-enter the Plex app, it resets the Direct Stream setting. I don’t want to globally disable Direct Stream nor MPEG2 support .
