I’ve got various types of .mp4s and some will play just fine on phones, tvs, tablets, etc. And my recent .mp4s will not play well at all.
The difference being the most recent .mp4s are at 1920x1080 (though same file size as the 1280x1024).
First, it’s trying to Direct Play no matter what so that might be an issue…
Server Hardware is AMD2950x @ 4.2ghz, Nvidia Titan X SLIx2, 64gb of RAM, Server is on an NVME drive and the files are all on various mechanical drives.
If someone can interpret the difference between mp4s that will play and won’t, I can post the media info screen shots.
Once I set my other Plex players to convert and not Direct Play - (even though they’re on the LAN) - it worked fine.
My android application (for some reason can’t disable Direct Play). But once I got off my wifi and went to cell service, it started converting and worked fine.
It’s not the power of the server because I’m converting 5 different 1080p streams right now without a problem but Direct Play seems to be jacked - but only for these recent mp4 containers.
The video codec is what matters. A .mp4 file is a file that uses the mp4 container, but could have video in a few different codecs; most commonly used right now are h264 and h265. If the client doesn’t support a codec, then it cannot be direct played.
This is likely the issue because if you allow transcoding of the video (not direct play), then the plex server will transcode the video (and audio) into a format the client supports.
Plex should show the video and audio codecs for a movie/tv show on the files page of the website so you can compare a movie that direct plays with one that does not.
Just checked, both .mp4s are H264 codec. In fact everything but the Audio Profile is the same (the one that attempts to Direct Play but doesn’t has a he-aac audio profile whereas the one that does direct play without problem has a lc audio profile).
The High Efficiency AAC codec is not compatible with every device. (And even if it is on paper, it might have produced faulty behaviour during development or testing and was subsequently disabled.)
