Server Version#: 1.30.0.6359
Player Version#: 4.87.2
This has been happening for months, but I’ve been ignoring it in hopes this would get fixed in an update, but this continues to happen. Upon choosing a TV episode to watch, the show will play fine, but then it will get to the end and the “hourglass” circle will just spin and spin and spin, failing to continue onto the next episode. I’m using Vivaldi browser for the player, latest version, but I also tested this in Chrome and it occurs there as well.
I will add that this doesn’t happen with all videos, but it is consistently happening with the same videos. One thing I’ve noticed with a couple examples: The video length shows 23:10, same in VLC Player, however, when playing the video in VLC, the video (data? if I can call it that) seems to only play until 23:08 and then abruptly stops before getting to the 23:10, which seems fine, it doesn’t appear that any intended content is getting cut off. But it does seem that Plex seems to have issues with video files that “report” being longer than their actual content, even tho every other media player I’ve tried is able to play it correctly.
Let me know if there are any other details that you need to further dig into it.
Could you investigate one or two of those video files, where the issue happens?
Demux the file into its separate streams.
Depending on your experience with media files, this can be done with various tools. If you haven’t done it before, here’s how I usually do it: get MKVtoolnixGUI and install it. Then get also MKVcleaver and install it.
If the video file in question is already in MKV format, open it with MKVcleaver and demux it. If it is in a different container fomat, use MKVtooolnix first to mux it into an MKV container.
Now play the video track and the audio track(s) separately in a regular desktop player (e.g. VLC) See what the player tells you about the play time of the file.
If there are subtitle tracks, open them with Subtitle Edit and see if there are lines in there which are supposed to be shown after the end of the video file.
The goal is to see if the file contains streams which are of different length than the video stream. It’d help a great deal to identify the characteristics of the files which produce the issue.
Ok, so I found some very strange findings, altho maybe you have seen this before. But I found a case file where this problem occurs, and MKV source file. Upon demuxing, there was only 2 parts to it, the audio and video. The video was a length of 1:41:25, according to VLC. But, the strange part is, when I loaded the .aac audio into VLC, the length kept changing as the file is played. It starts at around 27 hours and quickly gets down to 1:39 (less than the video length) and fluctuates around, sometimes even increasing. I’m assuming that jumping ahead to near the end to see where it reports as ending probably isn’t gonna result in anything accurate to report. I suspect this is what is the source of the problem. Let me know if you require any additional information to move forward.
No, the thing with the audio is normal. I’m seeing the same. “naked” AAC files don’t have accurate time stamps in them.
As long as the audio stream is not excessively longer than the video, this should pose no problem.
Another thing which comes to mind is that the video stream is perhaps damaged near the end.
Play the file in VLC and see if you can live withour the last 1 – 3 seconds of it.
If yes, use again MKVtoolnixGUI to cut the file around a time stamp near the end.
See [HowTo]: splitting multi-episode files with MKVtoolnix GUI for a How-To.
The problem with that is there are potentially hundreds of video files that suffer this same fate. Manually doing this to all these files is not feasible, especially with no known way to identify them other than “the ones I observe it happen to”, which is a lot of them.
Over the past few months while waiting for a response to this, I’ve noticed several TV shows that I’ve watched thru Plex in the past did so without playback interruption, but now it does, seemingly because of this issue. So there is something that definitely changed at some point on Plex’s end.
Additional info: Playing the MKV vs the demuxed AVI, seemed to show a difference of 1 second in length, the MKV reported the longer length, but also VLC seemed to stop the playback around 2 seconds short of that (1 second earlier than the AVI length).
Ok, I see what you mean now and isolated the fail point. The mobile app behaves correctly. So I opened up Chrome and tried it there and it worked there as well (despite what I reported per my original message). The problem seems to only occur in my web browser of choice, Vivaldi. So the question is, is this a problem with Vivaldi or is this something the Plex team needs to fix on their end? The question being, do I need to submit a bug report to them instead?
To be honest: with Vivaldi being what it is (a heavily locked-down browser, which is explicitely built to hinder scripted websites do their thing), some limitations and quirks are to be expected.
IMHO, it is kinda amazing that this is the only issue you are experiencing.
Another issue I’m having is episodes are playing in strange orders too. This is also something that didn’t used to occur, but now is. (Not looking for support for that in this post, I’d open another post for that) just to name another issue. But security/privacy is very important to me, this is why I choose Vivaldi. I do hope that Vivaldi users aren’t just blanket-disregarded.
I you are concerned with using a web browser, why not switch to one of the desktop Plex clients instead?
That way you can be sure sure that all data they have access to are about Plex and Plex alone.
I think I gave it a try in the past and didn’t like it, can’t remember. I can give it a try again. But either way, I will restate: I do hope that Vivaldi users aren’t just blanket-disregarded.
If you believe this is an issue with Vivaldi itself, I have no problem reporting the problem to them and referencing this thread so they have all the info they need to look into it.
