@cgruppo Looks like there’s something the Xbox One doesn’t like about the audio track that is triggering a transcode. Can you share the media XML for the problematic item?
Here is the Movie XML file
@cgruppo Thanks. It’s because the audio track has eight channels, and Xbox One apps can only handle upto six at the moment.
I am also having tanscoding with this video which is from my phone. The audio is direct streaming but not the video
@cgruppo The Xbox One can’t direct play 4K H264 video.
Is this a hardware limitation of the xbox or software? I have the same issue with My Sony Bravia TV as well.
It’s a limitation of the platform, we’re limited to whatever third party apps are in regards to codec support.
@Moussa So, I guess, I am back to the original Question… why does it play for 30 seconds, then switch to transcoding?
my file is h.265 and the 5.1 is supported
@wesman The Xbox One encounters an error at some point decoding your file (for whatever reason, possibly corrupt segment). We cannot continue as is, so instead of stopping playback completely we force a transcode (which should fix any errors in the encoded stream) so we can continue.
@Moussa said:
@wesman The Xbox One encounters an error at some point decoding your file (for whatever reason, possibly corrupt segment). We cannot continue as is, so instead of stopping playback completely we force a transcode (which should fix any errors in the encoded stream) so we can continue.
Yeah, I get that… That, is why I made this post…
The question is why is it encountering an error, and how do we fix, said error, so do don’t do that…
It might seem like a small thing, and generally it would be, however, 4K files are huge, and don’t transcode well in real time, I don’t mind switching to my Samsung TV app (which plays it without issue) or the Roku (also, no issue) but I would like to do it on XBOX as well.
AND I assume we would want to fix this for xbox, hence, the post, and all the data, why do you think its happening?
There isn’t anything for us to fix here unfortunately. When we direct play something we pass the URL of the file directly to the media element in the Xbox One app, and the Xbox One completely handles decoding it. At some point we observe the media element has emitted an error code of 3 (WARN - [Plex for Xbox One] [Player] Media element error code: 3 is the relevant line in your logs), which translates to MEDIA_ERR_DECODE: An error of some description occurred while decoding the media resource. That’s all the information we have, we have no idea what the error is or why it happened, all we know is that the Xbox One media player is in an error state and cannot continue playing the item.
Your only solutions are to skip past the part of the media file that triggers that error (if it’s always in the same spot) or to rerip the media to get rid of that problematic segment.
@Moussa so if I am understanding correctly. These issues are caused by the codecs in the xbox one software as well as in my TV. The only fix would be for them to fix it in their code so that the plex app could then direct stream it? ie not being able to direct stream the h264?
No, the issue is almost certainly something to do with the video stream encoding in your media file. There’s something wrong with the encoding and it’s tripping up the Xbox One when trying to play it. Other software players might play it fine (like mpv) because they’re better at handling malformed files, but the issue is almost definitely to do with the file itself. As I mentioned your best bet is to rerip it.
Just FYI, this happens in very 4K movie I play
Did you ever solve this? I’m having a very similar issue.
Does video bitrate matter here? If so, what determines the maximum?
I’m seeing this same issue with EVERY H265 file with AAC 5.1 audio, so it starts in direct play, but then stutters after a few moments and starts to transcode. My 2011 MacMini clearly can’t handle the transcode, so the files aren’t very useful as is.
Any other recommendations or workarounds?
@ZipTBM said:
Does video bitrate matter here? If so, what determines the maximum?
Only if you have a video bit rate limit set or the server owner (if not you) has a bandwidth limit set. Other than that there is currently not a set bandwidth limit (by default) in the app.
I’m seeing this same issue with EVERY H265 file with AAC 5.1 audio, so it starts in direct play, but then stutters after a few moments and starts to transcode. My 2011 MacMini clearly can’t handle the transcode, so the files aren’t very useful as is.
Any other recommendations or workarounds?
What you describe is what Moussa was stating above. It starts playing the video file, the Xbox One media player reports an error with the video stream so the app then requests a transcode since the underlying media player can’t handle the original stream.
The only workaround for that type of situation is to reaquire the media with a video stream the media player isn’t erroring out on or to reencode the video stream your self offline. But until the video stream itself is fixed (or a bug in the HEVC decoder on the xbox one is discovered/fixed) there isn’t any other workaround that would work.
