I’m hoping someone can help. I’m a very inexperienced PMS user, so I’m not sure what settings to put into what category. I’m trying to use my XBO to stream from my QNAP NAS with a 2.41 dual core Intel processor and 8Gigs of RAM. I’m a PlexPass member for the year, and there was a firmware that worked great, but they updated PMS, and now all I get is “There was a problem trying to play this media”, so I’ve been trying with the latest update. I have “Direct Stream” and “Direct Play” turned on on the XBO. I have a problem with movies from 2009 and back. Anything newer, plays fine. I have noticed that Universal titles play no matter the year. Everything else, I get about 5 seconds in, then it pauses, then plays, then pauses, etc. I’m trying to play h.264 MKV bluray rips, and I’d rather not degrade the quality by using something like Handbrake, or take up the remaining space in my NAS using Plex “Optimized” versions. I was hoping someone is doing what I’m doing, and can fill me in on settings.
To first try and figure out what is happening it would be helpful to see your Plex Media Server.log file when attemping to playback one of these skipping files. Without that, all we can really do is kind of guess.
With that being said, if these are all bluray rips I would first check to see if they are all indeed h264 as some bluray rips are VC-1 which will cause issues. This is because VC-1 is single threaded and limits the amount of cores that can be used to 1. The next thing I would check is if subtitles are enabled. Currently, the Xbox One app needs to burn subtitles into the video stream which means the video stream needs to be transcoded to accept the subtitle stream.
Those are the two most common issues on the Xbox One app that match similarly to what you are seeing, but your logs will help immensely in figuring out what is going on.
Looking at the log I do see this for one of the bluray rips:
DEBUG - TPU: hardware transcoding: zero-copy support not present
This would mean that the video is transcoding using the software decoder only and since this is a full bluray rip @ 29Mbps+ that is going to put a major strain on the CPU. The typical recommendation for a 1080p video at around 10Mbps is 2,000 and when using the software decoder the CPU in your NAS has a score of 1,025.
In the log file you can see the parts when the server starts slowing down:
/video/:/transcode/session/eb01ddwgdkem/progress?progress=0.0&size=-22&speed=0.4&remaining=15874 (23 live)
What the speed value here means is that for every second of video the server is only able to transcode .4 seconds. (a value of 1 is real-time, everything above that is faster then real-time, and everything below 1 is too slow for real-time).
What I don’t know and have to find out is why that specific file is getting that TPU message. I don’t know if it means a problem with hardware transcoding altogether, or a specific aspect of that file that means only software decoding will work.
On a side note the file also has the original DTS-MA audio. Currently, any DTS audio triggers a transcode of audio (Until a DTS decoder is released by Microsoft or the passthrough option is fully released and able to be implemented by the developers). You don’t have subtitles enabled on that file, but it is possible that the audio triggering the transcode is what is causing the video limitation to trigger as well.
Apr 24, 2017 06:46:17.967 [0x7fd2e03ff700] DEBUG - Avatar - video.hasScalingMatrix limitation applies: 1 == 1
This is what is causing the video to need to transcode, and typically I have only seen this limitation used when the audio is forcing the file through the transcoder.
So, if I understand you correctly, it’s not how I have it set up, as I have it set for straight passthrough and Direct Play. It’s a limitation of the app, where it doesn’t have the DTS player installed or incorporated. So it transcodes. And my NAS doesn’t have the horsepower to transcode fast enough. So I’m kind of stuck until Microsoft releases the code for DTS to Plex, and they can incorporate it into the app.
What doesn’t make sense, I have DTS HD-MA movies made after 2009 that play fine. And Universal DTS HD-MA titles from any period that play fine. Is this a case of “It doesn’t have to make sense, it just is.”?
Currently there are no DTS decoders on the Xbox One for 3rd party apps and passthrough currently is only enabled for the bluray player on the Xbox One. So right now all DTS triggers an audio transcode.
The issue is that those blurays are triggering a video transcode due to the scalingMatrix, but at the same time (Still waiting on info to confirm this) this setting is blocking hardware transcoding. The older videos that are working either do not need video transcoding as well or are able to use the hardware decoder.
Using hardware transcoding that NAS/CPU will be more then enough to transcode through, but without it the bluray bit rates are just too high. So far the quickest path is looking like Microsoft releasing the passthrough ability to all apps and letting that get incorporated as the DTS decoder has been requested on the Xbox forums since release.
