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4K HEVC & Remux plays intermittent


mariokings
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mariokings

have Emby installed on my LG smart TV and on Windows 10 I use Chrome (Emby Web 4.4.3.0).

 

 

My movies are all on a NAS and all devices are in the same network.

 

When I start the app on my TV or on Chrome and select a 4K movie, it starts playing but stops after 2 seconds. Then, 6 seconds later, the movie continues to play for about 3-5 seconds and stops again.

 

 

1080p movies play without any issue and it doesn't seem to be any internet problem.

 

I have attached the logs of a 4K HEVC movie in case it helps finding a solution to this problem.

 

Thanks in advance,

Mário

embyserver.txt ffmpeg-transcode.txt

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Don't even need to open the logs.

Don't allow Transcode 4K movies.  You want to grant permission to 4K movies only to people who know that they can direct play the media or else it will put a hurting on your server and likely not look any better than a 1080 version if you can even get the transcoded 4K version to play.

So it's best to have both a 1080 and 4K version of media and you make sure the user plays the correct version for the client/hardware they are using.

That doesn't even get into HDR versions of the 4K movies.

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Happy2Play

This process takes a lot of power and whatever system Emby is installed on does not have it.  As you are only getting about 4.8 fps.

23:42:21.107 frame=23144 fps=4.8 q=28.0 size=  950662kB time=00:16:14.44 bitrate=7992.0kbits/s throttle=off speed=0.201x

As mentioned, 4K media will only really work on systems that direct play the media.

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Depending on your hardware you may be able to transcode 4K movie but likely your server won't have the horsepower to do so.

With the state of 4K as a general rule you want to put them in their own library and only allow your users that have 4K TV and needed bandwidth to access them.

A lot of people don't have enough bandwidth to stream 4K outside the house so it's a no go for remote 4K just from that.

If the client is not able to play 4K then it's going to make the server do a lot of work that wouldn't be needed it the 1080 version was served.  If the 4K movie is transcoded it's almost surely going to get downgrade to 1080 anyway.  So now instead of just serving a 1080 version that was encoded using high quality settings with no time limit on the encode you instead try to take a 4K movie and convert it at better than real-time using settings that aren't designed for high quality storage but to make something watchable.  Chances are the 1080 version on disc is going to have better quality then the converted 4K movie especially if it's an action movies with lots of fast changing scenes.

On top of that if the 4K movie was a 4K UHD it's going to have a different color space that will not look good at all on a non UHD screen/setup.

Hence for all these reasons only play 4K media on devices that can direct play the media and otherwise use the 1080 version that will direct play.  So basically any movie in 4K will ALSO have a 1080 version available.

You're welcome to ignore this advise but then you're back to your op post where you can only convert at about 1/5th the speed needed.  If you have a high end GPU that can properly decode 4K and 4K UHD then maybe you can do it.

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mariokings

Thank for all the answers everyone.

Probably my computer is not able to play 4K but my LG Smart TV I am absolutely certain that can do so, in fact I've just direct play a 4K with it, so I don't understand why it doesn't play 4K HEVC & Remux versions. Is it the server that is not strong enough than?

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  • Solution

HEVC is the heart of 4K.  But there are all kinds of flavors and color spaces as well as 8, 10 or 12 bit files.

When you try and play one of these files that won't play on the LG Smart, go to your web admin and look at this playback and it will tell you why it's wanting to transcode.

It could be as simple as trying to play back subtitles that are in the wrong format to wrong color space or a higher bit count than your TV can play.

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mariokings

I'm so sorry everyone I'm new at Emby and I didn't know a lot of basic stuff, like going to the dashboard and below active devices seeing if it is direct playing, direct streaming, or transcoding. Thank you so much for helping me out, cayars.

It seems my LG Smart TV was only transcoding because of the sound and subtitles. It was Dolby TrueHD Atmos and PGS and I switched to DTS-HD e SRT and went immediately from transcoding to direct play without any problems.

I only have one final question:

On Chrome and every other browser that I tried it always play in direct streaming mode, is there a browser that can Direct Play a 1080p Bluray movie, for example?

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Yes, but don't fear direct streaming as it's very little CPU overhead.

But if you want something that will direct play rip your discs to MP4 using h.264 video codec and AAC 2 channel stereo sound. You can add a 2nd (or more) sound tracks as well but the 2 channel AAC marked as the default will allow it to direct play.

There are other formats but this is a common one that just works!

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Happy2Play
1 hour ago, mariokings said:

On Chrome and every other browser that I tried it always play in direct streaming mode, is there a browser that can Direct Play a 1080p Bluray movie, for example?

As far as I know there are no browsers that support mkv containers currently, that is why the media gets repackaged.  You should see in the ffmpeg log that the codec audio and video are copied to a new container.

Go to html5test.com and look at the Streaming-video codecs section every browser will have slightly different capabilities.

Edited by Happy2Play
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