Emby does not transcode when source file is unsupported by device

[quad 0]

Hi,

 

I'm having an issue where the Android app seems to simply not consider what video formats are supported by a device. Is this normal behaviour?

 

A Nexus 5X with LineageOS+MicroG is my main phone. But to rule out my weird phone being the issue I also tested the Emby app on a Lenovo Yoga Tab 3, a Google Pixel and a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4.

 

On all devices, the Emby app does not consider supported codecs when deciding if it should trancode a video file. All of the above devices can only perform hardware acceleration on regular 8-bit h264. However, emby will happily direct play videos encoded in 10-bit h264 or h265, which either lag horribly, even on high-end devices. Or in the case of my Yoga Tab 3 fails completely and only gives me a gray box where the video should be.

 

It's not a horrible issue for 10-bit h264. I simply have to check the bitrate of whatever I'm trying to stream and set the bitrate slightly lower. But for h265 it's terrible. While an h265 movie might look passable at 4 mbit/s, it will not transcode it into a decent quality h264 video. Instead I have to set my bitrate limit to 3 mbit. Which can look absolutely horrible, especially in darker scenes. Coming from Plex I'm used to it detecting if my device cannot play said 4 mbit h265 file and it will instead transcode it to a h264 file at around 6-8 mbit instead. Which will look decent when streamed to a device.

 

My server is version 3.3.0.0 on a FreeBSD VM and it was set up according to the installation instructions. Whenever I set a bitrate lower than the source file, the transcode logs on the server all contain:

"SupportsTranscoding":true,"SupportsDirectStream":true,"SupportsDirectPlay":true

So I suspect the Android app is trying to detect what it supports, but for some reason believes it supports DirectPlaying h265 and therefore requests it from the server. Even if it does not support hardware decoding, or in the case of my Tab 3, any playback at all. I do however find it very odd that it would fail to detect optimal video codecs on 4 out of 4 of my devices. None of which I would consider extremely uncommon models.

 

Any help trying to troubleshoot this would be highly appreciated. I was hoping there was some button to force transcoding to (8-bit) h264, but I simply can't find any option for it.

Edited June 11, 2018 by quad

[quad 0]

Also, for some reason, I don't seem to have any app logs. They're not present on any of my devices.

 

[Luke 37116]

hi there @@quad, thanks for the report. We'll take a look at this for the next release of the app. Thanks !