I currently encode all of my media for Direct Play on apple devices as most of my clients are apple. Recently, files, including older files that never had issue with direct play, have begun to transcode when playing on my Apple TV 4. I do not have this issue for any iOS devices. I am running the most current version of PMS (1.9.3) on a Synology NAS DS415+.
The information in the Now Playing section of the web app indicates that the files are transcoding video H264 to H264 and Audio AAC to AAC, which tells me that my codecs and containers are all ok. This led me to believe that there is an issue with the bitrate, but I am unable to find any logs that show me why a file is being transcoded.
I performed some testing by re-encoding a file that was giving me issues with direct play. The file was originally encoded as an m4v h264 High profile 3.0, which Apple indicates should be supported by the ATV 4. However, it also has a supported format of H.264 Baseline Profile level 3.0 or lower with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio, so I recoded the file to that format, which resulted in a Direct Play of the file. Great!
However, I then recoded another file to the exact same specs, but that file continued to transcode. The only difference I noticed between the two files is that, although both files show an audio bitrate of 155kb/s when viewing the metadata in Media-Info, Plex is showing an audio bitrate of 170kb/s when selecting “Get Info” for the file within the Plex Web app. I re-analyzed the file, but Plex is still reporting a bitrate of 170kb/s.
I am out of ideas of what to do, so I am really hoping someone can provide further insight. I realize that Plex is transcode filed on-the-fly so that users do not have to think about the details of their file formats, but my server is just not capable of keeping up with he transcoding sessions. I have also attempted to roll-back PMS to 1.9.2 and 1.9.1, but neither has resolved the problem. I was unable to find any older versions of PMS.
