Trouble playing certain high bitrate files

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
1

I’ve got a couple of high bitrate files that I have trouble playing on the PS4. I know I am pushing the limit of the allowed spec for a video file on PS4, but I have a higher bitrate file that plays just fine, and Im trying to see what is the exact reason this particular file won’t play.

Attached is a clean log where I:

  1. Played the highest bitrate file that starts with no problem (Manchurian Candidate)
  2. Played a file that struggles at the beginning, but after logos appears to catch up and play fine (It Happened One Night)
  3. Played a file that won’t load at all and will freeze up Plex for PS4 causing me to restart the program (Paths of Glory)

Like I said, I would have chalked it up to simply being too high of a bitrate, but The Manchurian Candidate is higher bitrate of the three files and plays fine.

Any ideas?

2

It would be great if you could give me some sample files, that way I could run a bunch of tests and hopefully tweak the profile to handle them better,

3

Will do. I’ll clip up the files in question, then test to make sure they still stumble and send them your way.

4

@kay.one said:
It would be great if you could give me some sample files, that way I could run a bunch of tests and hopefully tweak the profile to handle them better,

Ok, I used MKV Toolnix to to only send you the first chapter or two of the problem files. I’ve tested all three of the clips and they have the same issues as the full length file.

I determined the issue with the file that struggled at the beginning was due to the source file.

Thanks for looking into these!

5

One more example of a file that won’t play at all:

6

Thanks a lot for the samples. I spend the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why these files are having issues, and to be honest I don’t know yet. I even brought in a couple of people that know codecs/transcoders much better than I do and the consensus seems to be that there is nothing technically wrong with these files; however, they are ridiculously encoded. (I’ll get to that later)

some background on what I’ve found,

“Manchurian Candidate” plays fine because we can direct play it, the other samples would direct play if they didn’t have a FLAC audio track; And we can’t direct play FLAC because of a bug in Samsung player that causes FLAC audio to go out of sync with the video. So theoretically if you transcode your files to have an AAC/AC3/MP3 audio track they would direct play fine with no issues and all this would go away.

What can you do? First and easiest is to transcode the audio track of your files to ACC/AC3. That would allow the TV to direct play the videos, and everything should be okay.
If you have time, I would also suggest transcoding the video track as well using a lower VBR (Variable Bitrate) instead of super high CBR (Constant Bitrate) that it currently is. You would get the same quality but would put much less pressure on the player as well as save you a ton of disk space.

If you don’t want to touch your files you can always disable “Direct Stream” in the settings, this will force the server to transcode the video which in my testing solves the issue.

So why can’t we fix it? Well, because I can’t tell which attribute of the video is throwing off the player. If we did know, we could teach the app that you can’t direct play that file and it would automatically force a transcode which would fix the issue.

I wish I could tell you, oh, found the issue, will be fixed in the next release, but unfortunately this is not one of those problems :frowning:

7

Wow, I just realized you posted the issue about PS4 and I tested it on Samsung (still had the same issue!)

Time to check PS4, might have a similar result.

8

ok, so we actually have a fix, but it’ll be in PMS, you can also fix the issue right now by updating your PlayStation 4 App.xml in the profile folder,

from

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mpegts" videoCodec="h264" audioCodec="aac" context="streaming" />

to:

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mpegts" videoCodec="h264" audioCodec="aac" context="streaming" >
    <Setting name="BreakNonKeyframes" value="true" />
</VideoProfile>
9

Wow, thanks for looking into this!

I just made the change and everything plays great! I even tried the file that was struggling at the beginning, and it played without any issue as well! (I thought it was the source file)

If you have time, I would also suggest transcoding the video track as well using a lower VBR (Variable Bitrate) instead of super high CBR (Constant Bitrate) that it currently is. You would get the same quality but would put much less pressure on the player as well as save you a ton of disk space.

I follow Don Melton’s guidelines for encoding, but I did encode these files at a much higher bitrate than normal. They should be Variable in bit rate even if they appear to be CBR in metadata. The CRF setting is pushing for a high quality, but the “vbv-maxrate” and “vbv-bufsize” keep the bitrate in check, so it ends up being quite efficient. I just had those bitrate buffers set pretty high to retain the grain and keep certain quality.

10

@kay.one said:
ok, so we actually have a fix, but it’ll be in PMS,

Was this ever committed to PMS in one of the recent updates?

11

unfortunately, it’s taking a bit longer than we expected. But it should be there Soon ™ :slight_smile: