I’ve downloaded a new TV show. The episodes are in .mkv format. They play fine on the Plex Web TV app. When I attempt to play them on the Xbox One, my SmartGlass (which I use as my remote) shows the time counting, as it it’s playing, but, the Xbox One is on a blank screen. After about a couple of minutes, I get an error on screen. “Error - Playback Error - There was a problem playing this item” with my only options as “Go Home” and “Retry”. I have another show in .MKV format that plays just fine. Any suggestions or ideas ? I’m going to see if it will play on my other Xbox One and Roku and I’ll report back. Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.
It did NOT play on my other XBox One.
It does play on my Playstation 4, Roku, IPhone & Computer.
Can anyone help me understand why this won’t play on the Xbox One, but, plays on every other device ?
XB1 direct plays MKVs, while many other apps still need to transcode.
However - there are encodings/codecs that don’t play nicely with XB1’s player and we’re still trying to work out exactly what trips us up. The next release contains logic to at least error better (hopefully!), but for now you can disable Direct Play in settings (although this is a global setting, so you’ll want to change it back after).
In the meantime, could you please send us details (encoding, audio setup, bitrate, resolution, h264 profile etc) of the MKV that fails , and the one that succeeds? You can get most of this by going to the ‘info’ for the video in Plex Web. Or just send us the MKVs as samples to take a look at, if that’s easier?
Couldn´t you add an “Disable Direct Play for MKV” Switch ?
We could, but even then it varies across MKVs. I still hope we can detect the error, back off and try remux/transcode, rather than fail so disgracefully. We’ve done some work towards this in the next release.
Here’s one of my TV shows that stuttered a lot if it helps:
Media
Video Resolution 720p
Duration 24:33
Bitrate 5908 kbps
Width 1280
Height 720
Aspect Ratio 1.78
Container MKV
Video Frame Rate 24p
Video
Codec H264
Bitrate 5908 kbps
Language English
Bit Depth 8
CABAC 1
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Color Space yuv
Duration 24:33
Frame Rate 23.976 fps
Frame Rate Mode cfr
Has Scaling Matrix 0
Height 720
Level 3.1
Profile high
Ref Frames 4
Scan Type progressive
Title [blanked]
Width 1280
Audio
Codec AAC
Channels Stereo
Language English
Audio Channel Layout stereo
Duration 24:33
Profile lc
Sampling Rate 48000 Hz
Title [blanked]
And I got that same error page with Go Home or Retry as options. This is on a brand new Xbox One that I don’t believe has the New Experience yet…
That all looks quite sane, and something we/XB1 should be able to direct play without breaking a sweat.
Could you please send me a sample? Thanks!
