Direct Play not working with TS files on Shield TV, works with other devices and on Plex

[ebr 14904]

13 hours ago, sjabaker said:

Trying to find a timestamp and then searching further and further ahead when it can't find one would seem to broadly fit with how the problem manifests from the outside viewer perspective, at least

Yes it does and I think that is probably pretty close to what may be happening.

13 hours ago, sjabaker said:

How come pretty much every other player manages to play-back and skip just fine without them, though

The other players you are comparing to are built for enthusiasts to play all kinds of media and have evolved over many years to work around lots of "bad" media encoding.  Also, many of them are basically wrappers around ffmpeg.

Google (developer of Exo), OTOH, has stated many times that their goal is to play properly formatted media in the best way possible and they are primarily designed for streaming.  I think the one statement I saw from an Exo dev was something to the effect of "we're not really interested in playing every broken media file you throw at us".  They like to stick to the specs and support only that.

Having said that, if we can identify exactly what is going on here, we may be able to make modifications in our own branch to handle these types of things better.

[sjabaker 8]

3 hours ago, ebr said:

Google (developer of Exo), OTOH, has stated many times that their goal is to play properly formatted media in the best way possible and they are primarily designed for streaming.  I think the one statement I saw from an Exo dev was something to the effect of "we're not really interested in playing every broken media file you throw at us".  They like to stick to the specs and support only that.

I can certainly appreciate that position. Mind you, this isn't "some random weird/corrupt file off the internet" - this is the digital media stream as broadcast by the BBC, ITV, Sky & other public broadcasters! So either they're disobeying the specs in their broadcasts or something more intricate & nuanced may going on. Anyway, since the chances of 'fixing the source' are pretty much zero...

3 hours ago, ebr said:

Having said that, if we can identify exactly what is going on here, we may be able to make modifications in our own branch to handle these types of things better.

...I really appreciate your efforts to see if there's anything that can be done in/around the player. I'm happy to try and help any way I can!

If it gives some hope - I know that the Plex client for Android TV also uses exoplayer under the hood, yet didn't have this problem when I used to run Plex in parallel - which suggests it might perhaps be possible to address it without having to rely on exoplayer changes.

[Carlo 4330]

1 hour ago, sjabaker said:

I can certainly appreciate that position. Mind you, this isn't "some random weird/corrupt file off the internet" - this is the digital media stream as broadcast by the BBC, ITV, Sky & other public broadcasters! So either they're disobeying the specs in their broadcasts or something more intricate & nuanced may going on. Anyway, since the chances of 'fixing the source' are pretty much zero...

Except it's not just a broadcast stream because it went through a tuner that may be trying to do error correction or change formats or any number of other things it's current firmware is set to do.  That's assuming it receives the data cleanly in the first place and has a strong signal.  Not trying to make excuses by any means but just saying it's not as simple as you think it may be.

Also many networks and TV stations broadcast out of spec and tuner manufactures are constantly chasing these issues and make firmware updates to handle things like this.