Transcoder exited due to an error on HE-AAC audio encoded files for iOS and TVOS clients

Plex Media Server
,
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Server Version#: 1.25.1.5286
Player Version#: iOS 7.26

I have Live TV & DVR recording setup and it looks like a few of the streams providing some of my shows are now using HE-AAC as the audio format. It seems that any streams the Plex records cannot playback on my AppleTV or iOS devices. Streams that were broadcast using AAC Low Complexity playback fine.

The same recorded files can playback fine from the Plex Web Player on Windows without error. So it seems when iOS TvOS devices try to playback these files the error is generated?

Is this a limitation of iOS? Is there a workaround? Obviously I cannot control the codec that the streaming broadcast provides so not sure if I can tweak/tune something on the iOS app or the Plex Server so that these files don’t cause the failure?

Logs uploaded - you can find on of the errors / failures around this time stamp Dec 09, 2021 07:19:29.711

Plex Media Server Logs_2021-12-09_07-26-16.zip (3.9 MB)

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Hrmm…perhaps it’s not all HE-AAC streams. I did find one and did manual recording of it just now and it seemed to work ok. So i’m not quite sure if this is the source of the issue or not.

What I do notice is that the streams that fail on iOS / TvOS players show this under Get Info:

  • Codec AAC
  • Channels 2
  • Bitrate 98 kbps
  • Language English
  • Language Tag en
  • Audio Channel Layout stereo
  • Profile he-aac
  • Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
  • Stream Identifier 257
  • Display Title English (HE-AAC Stereo)
  • Extended Display Title English (HE-AAC Stereo)
  • Codec EIA_608
  • Embedded In Video 1
  • Stream Identifier 256

Then if I see this where it says “Unknown”, it plays ok on iOS / TvOS

  • Codec AAC
  • Channels 2
  • Bitrate 96 kbps
  • Audio Channel Layout stereo
  • Profile he-aac
  • Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
  • Stream Identifier 257
  • Display Title Unknown (HE-AAC Stereo)
  • Extended Display Title Unknown (HE-AAC Stereo)
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Also, these videos that throw the transcoder error on iOS and TvOS clients, play just fine using another media player like KODI.

So Plex is able to play the stream, record the stream, but when it comes to playback of the recorded stream it fails on iOS and TvOS, but plays just fine from Plex for Web and also using an alternate media player like KODI.

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posting the exact errors I see from the console here to help other users who might be searching by error find this post:

Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.347 [0x7f3d48d37b38] Error — [Transcoder] [h264 @ 0x7f4740356600] no frame!
Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.347 [0x7f3d48d5ab38] Error — [Transcoder] [h264 @ 0x7f4740356600] non-existing SPS 0 referenced in buffering period
Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.348 [0x7f3d48d37b38] Error — [Transcoder] [h264 @ 0x7f4740356600] non-existing SPS 0 referenced in buffering period
Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.446 [0x7f3d48d37b38] Error — [Transcoder] [matroska @ 0x7f473f084d00] Error parsing AAC extradata, unable to determine samplerate.
Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.448 [0x7f3d48d5ab38] Error — [Transcoder] av_interleaved_write_frame(): Invalid argument
Dec 10, 2021 07:53:06.456 [0x7f3d48ddfb38] Error — [Transcoder] Error writing trailer of media-%05d.ts: Invalid argument
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Same issue here but fails not only on iOS, but Android TV (Shield) as well. Does play fine in browser. Same errors as well

1 Like
6

After a lot of digging around I found out that the issue was caused by having the DETECT COMMERCIALS option set to “Detect commercials and mark for skip”. Setting it to “Disabled” or “Detect and delete commercials” works just fine. This issue is only present on my Android devices,

Even went through all the hassle of completely removing and reinstalling my Plex server thinking that this may help. Weirdly enough, all the DVR recording I had from the old Plex installation were working fine (they were failing before reinstalling) on the new one but as soon as it recorded a new show with “Detect commercials and mark for skip” enabled, the issue occurred again. Hope this helps anyone experiencing the same issue.

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