Hi Alan,
The official Plex app doesn’t work for me, because it transcodes my 4k hdr movies to non-hdr (even when I enable direct play/stream). That’s why I purchased Xplay last year. And this worked perfectely, until now.
Zach
Have you disabled secure connections in Plex settings (under Settings -> Network)?
I have secure connections set to “preferred”, myself. Used to be fine,
is fine with the Plex app.
You might want to try it disabled. I experienced increased buffering of 4k movies after one of the XPlay updates a while back (and the official Plex app always had buffering issues for me). After I disabled secure connections, I haven’t encountered a single buffering instance using either app. Others have reported this setting may help with other playback issues (spinning red circle) and even pin loop problems.
Also, as to the issue with the official Plex app force-transcoding your 4k movies, I’m going to guess these are movies with TrueHD audio format and subtitles? See this thread: LG-WebOS Bug Report: 4k HDR movies with TrueHD audio and external subtitles (.srt) forcing transcoding. @bublikoff apparently found a workaround to make TrueHD work on these LG TVs without transcoding (you can see this in the Plex dashboard), which is why XPlay can play these movies without transcoding while the Plex app cannot.
I was having the same issue (buffering problems when playing 4k content) and disabling secure connections seems to do the trick. I didn’t test it deeply yet, but it seems to be solved.
Thanks
Indeed, disabling the secure connections also solved the problem of buffering! Thanks alot for the advise!!
Running version 2.715.704. Now experiencing the buffering issue with 4k content. Secure connections was already disabled. Other content plays fine.
edit 20/5/19
My bad, the tv was connected to the 2.4GHz wifi instead of the 5GHz.
Recently I bought xplay for a fee.
There is one question.
It is transcoding unconditionally when the subtitles are in various languages in the video itself.
In the case of the official plex app, direct playback without transcoding is possible even with built-in subtitles for various languages.
Do you have any settings or workarounds that do not transcode embedded subtitles?
Xplay and subtitle handling is an endless source of “joy” (not…).
The basiscs: only text based subtitles can be displayed without transcoding, anything images based (internal or externel) will be transcoded.
- Internal subtitles (TXT): only the FIRST subtitle track defined in the file will be displayed without transcoding, every other track will trancode
- external subtitles: MUST be named exactly as the video file, must be UTF-8, then it can be displayed without transcoding, everything else will result in transcoding…
HTH?
K.
UTF-8 is not necessary.
ANSI also works.
@bublikoff today’s update is even worse
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Terrible handling of on deck and continue watching half of my stuff is missing
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Resume function still not working on webos 2.2
I changed my server (hardware) running Plex but Xplay still tries to connect to the old server at startup. How can i default connection to the new server ? (the old server is of course removed/deleted from my plex account)
@bublikoff with the todays update now the ongoing red spinning circle turned into yellow neverending spinning circle!! And the app is still unusable…
Please help mate, i really want to use your app but new updates ruined it for me
Wanted to give this app one more chance since I paid for it, newest update installed via LG store (on WebOS 1.4) , app crashes (this app will be restarted to free up more memory blablah …) almost every time I start playing a video… useless.
Red circle keeps turning, but the movie keeps not starting. When you gona fix this app finaly, all we have payd you!
Relax dude…
The dev have explained multiple times this in not an easy fix (including the dependencies on LG engineering). And it’s not like we cannot play any media. We’re talking about 4K, High bit rate media! It’s a miracle that these TV’s are even able to play them, let alone play them flawlessly.
Well on my TV 49uh661v the new version can’t play any media, neither SD, HD or 4K.
I think the dev is wrong. I have v1 on one TV, and it plays things flawlessly. I have the new version on another TV (the exact same model) and it’s practically useless. Unfortunately, my fiance updated the app because the LG tv said there was an update.
So i don’t see how it’s LG’s problem. There was a useful version that worked well for ages, and now he’s lost that version and has made enough changes that have caused problems and now things are in a busted state. He can’t roll back because he doesn’t have the code anymore and we have to live with the consequences.
I have several other video apps from other devs, and they all work fine. It’s only this version of xplay that has the problem. I don’t buy that it’s someone else’s fault when it’s literally only this branch of this app that is so problematic.
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Its been mentioned before, but try disabling secure connections in the PMS network settings. That solved the media playback problems for me.
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I have tried this, and it makes no difference. One machine works flawlessly every time. The other (which used to work fine) sometimes works, often does not. Will get random spinnies. Random crashes. Forgets where you are in a video. And has all sorts of other issues i’ve reported here. I even tried swapping TV locations to see if it might be internal network related, but we still get the same. The v1 device is fine, the current-version device just works sometimes, and other times just is a cluster-F.
I really wish v1 were just available again. I could at lest run both TVs on the same working version that works great here.
