Roku Plex client conversion logic is broken

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

This took a while to piece together as there are a bunch of different things that all line up to cause problems so I’ll lay out the facts and then explain the full issue.

  1. Plex doesn’t support embedded metadata for MKV files.
  2. Roku doesn’t support 4k MP4 files.
  3. Roku supports 4k MKV files.
  4. Roku doesn’t support VP9, OPUS, etc in MP4 files.
  5. Roku supports VP9, OPUS, etc in MKV files.

Because Plex doesn’t support MKV metadata, even if only to match the same fields, etc as MP4 means that Libraries without online metadata must use MP4 containers.

When playing 4k MP4 files on Roku, they are converted down to 1080 h264. This can cause the stream to use more bandwidth than direct play of the original 4k stream, depending on the codec.

When playing MP4 files that contain VP9 video and OPUS audio, which Roku does not support, Plex converts both the video and audio.

When playing MP4 files that contain h264 video and OPUS audio, which the Roku does not support, Plex defaults to Direct Play. This means that the video plays but the audio is ignored. If Direct Play is disabled, Plex converts the audio.

I propose that the Roku client defaults to converting MP4 containers to MKV. Not only does this fix the h264/OPUS bug, but it also reduces the amount of conversion required. Since Roku supports VP9, OPUS, and more in MKV but not MP4, Plex can copy those directly into the MKV container stream. This means that Roku users can enjoy the broader codec support and still keep the embedded metadata that they already have.

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Roku does support 4K MP4. Also MP4 is the only way to get Dolby vision to work. Although a recent Plex update seems to have broken a lot of stuff related to this.

3

Roku only supports h265 and AV1 formats for 4k MP4 files. If you have VP9 files then they need to be in a MKV container but then you can’t use embedded metadata.

4K Video – H.265/HEVC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV); VP9 (.MKV, .WEBM) and AV1 (.MKV, MP4) on some Roku devices

In regards to DV only being supported via MP4, I have not tested HDR much due to Roku only being equipped with a 100M port. Plex could provide the container conversion as an option in the UI like they currently do with MPEG-2.

Even if they don’t do that, MP4 files with h264 video are not properly converting audio codecs which Roku doesn’t support in MP4.

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