I have just bought a new Samsung TV and I’m really dissapointed how annoying the player is on the latest TVs. I used to have an old Samsung TV from 2014 that had the old unsupported version of plex app that has not been updated for a long time. With that TV I never had any problems but with the Tizen TV app I get problems a lot.
I have a series which has some episodes of different formats, some in AVI and some in MPEG. The AVI ones play fine but the MPEG ones always fail to play saying “playback error an unexpected playback problem occurred”. To fix this I have to disable the direct play option for the episode and then they play fine.
However with my old TV, with the legacy app that hasn’t been updated for years, that problem never occurred. Any episode that needed direct streaming or transcoding, played that way automatically without any problem whatsoever. How can an app that hasn’t been updated and hasn’t had features added for so many years be a lot more reliable than the latest and greatest plex player?
Not only that but the new app has plenty of problems playing episodes of all sorts of formats especially when transcoding HEVC format videos. On the new TV a lot of episodes play with no picture, green picture, intermittently, stuttering, or just fail to play that have no issue playing on the old TV. I have to either disable direct play and/or direct stream, change the video play format to force transcoding to a lower bitrate or sometimes they just fail altogether. I should not have to manually change these settings in order for it to pick the right playback mode!!
When can we expect the newer TVs to play things consistently and as reliably as my old 2014 TV did???
Server Version#: 1.25.2.5319
Player Version#: latest
Your TV transcodes nothing. It is Plex that transcodes on the server.
The problem with new devices is that they have to be correctly defined. I “think” Plex has a configuration file for each device it knows about. It is possible that your new TV just does not have a correct cfg file.
Plex will need more info before they can make a good stab at fixing this for you. You should post exact model numbers and how everything is connected and logs and exact details of how everything is connected.
The fist place I would look is the network connection method. If it is wireless and it can be connected wired that is what I would do. Wired is always better than wireless.
I’m sorry but all of that is irrelevant. I’m not talking about the ability to transcode but the ability to decide when to transcode. And it is not device specific, but app specific.
I have another Tizen TV that I’ve had for a while which is a completely different model to the new one and it has the exact same issues becuase it is specific to the player software.
It is also the reason I have been hesitant to replace my old TV for so long because I know how bad the new version player software is in this regard because it also happens to a friend of mine who has another Samsung TV model yet again using the same tizen software.
The web app & mobile apps do not have this problem, but the samsung tizen app does and I bet you can ask any tizen user and they will tell you the same thing. There are numerous threads about people getting playback problems on samsung TVs and having to disable the direct play options to play episodes correctly but you should not have to do that manually.
The setting is to “Allow Direct Play” meaning that it should allow that option if it works but should transcode if it doesn’t, but when playback fails it doesn’t always automatically try to fallback to transcoding unless you manually disable the option above. This is a BUG and needs to be fixed!
