Unable to watch recordings done with Plex on Apple devices

General Discussions Plex Features
1

Hi there

I having trouble getting any recordings done via Plex Live DVR in h.264 to play back directly on my Apple devices (Apple TV and iOS). I get the sound but not the picture. If I however during playback go into “Playback settings”, “Quality” and chose “Convert Automatically” - then I do get the picture. This option however is only available once playback has started.

The Plex server reports “Converting”, “Video Direct Stream”, “Audio Transcoding AC3 to AAC” - both before and after the above change.

If I however change the configuration for “Home Streaming” on my playback device to a bitrate lower then the recording - Plex does full transcoding and I have both picture and sounds.

I have also tried with and without “Use Recommended Settings”, “Automatically Adjust Quality” and “Allow Direct Play” - so far I have not found a combination that works.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Kim

2

Did some more testing tonight and found that the issue only occurs with 1080i recordings - they will not playback on Apple devices (Apple TV, iPad and iPhone)

Any recordings done in 720p is working fine.

The strange thing is that Plex “knows” it’s a 1080i recording because it’s show “Video 1080i-h264” when I clicked to see details of the recording so Plex should know that the devices can’t decode Interlaced.

Surely other people are having the same issues?

Regards
Kim

3

I’m also having this issue. I’ve had to perform another encoding from Handbrake in order to have direct play work.

This only occurs with capture content from the HD PVR 2. For recordings from the HD HomeRuns it works normally.