Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

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diablo75
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Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by diablo75 »

Hello, this is my first post here so hopefully I don't break any rules by mistake.

I just set up an older Samsung TV in my bedroom my wifes mother gave to us. It's a UN32H5203 running the latest available firmware, version 1220 (release May 29, 2020). Prior to this I was mostly using UMS to share videos from my computer to a PS4 in the living room and have never had a problem, save for an occasional transcoding issue where manually selecting an alternative would resolve playback on that device, and in all of those cases it was a matter of either working all the way through or never starting playback at all and the PS4 complaining that the format of the video wasn't supported.

Playback of most videos to the TV works fantastically, but I've come across a few videos that have a problem where a video will begin playing and then stop playback anywhere from around 15 seconds into playback to a few minutes with no error message on screen on the TV and it moving forward to play the next video in the folder or restarting the video you were just watching from the beginning and again failing at about the same time as before. Also when the video begins playing you can see at the top that the TV thinks the total duration of the video is just one second. I have no problems playing this video on my computer, or my phone (via VLC over wifi) or the PS4.

I've attached a tracelog to this post. I made a copy of one of the videos I'm having this problem with and put it in test folder, told UMS to only share that folder and clear it's database out. I then proceeded to start tracing logs and recreate the issue. My default global transcoder is currently VLC. I also went into the Transcode folder on the TV after the first playback failed and proceeded to let it attempt to play back the same video with every other transcoder available. FFmpeg, Mencoder and VLC are able to play, but they all fail in the same way. Avisynth and tsmuxer have never worked.

Sorry if this is a repeat issue someone else has posted about already. I didn't really know which keywords would be best to search for. Thanks for the help.
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pipin
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by pipin »

diablo75 wrote: Fri Mar 26, 2021 2:17 pm

Playback of most videos to the TV works fantastically, but I've come across a few videos that have a problem where a video will begin playing and then stop playback anywhere from around 15 seconds into playback to a few minutes with no error message on screen on the TV and it moving forward to play the next video in the folder or restarting the video you were just watching from the beginning and again failing at about the same time as before. Also when the video begins playing you can see at the top that the TV thinks the total duration of the video is just one second. I have no problems playing this video on my computer, or my phone (via VLC over wifi) or the PS4.
I have the same issues with both my samsung tvs. Although the duration is often shown as 0:00:0 and you can't fast forward that videos. And the real size of the video is not shown - most times its shown like 976 kb.

Its probably an encoding problem. Some files can be played without encoding, some can't be played even if i try all transcoding engines.
Regards,
Jens
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Devices used with UMS : - Windows 10 PC, Samsung UE32 F4580SS, Samsung UE48H6600
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mik_s
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by mik_s »

The Samsung conf being used is fairly old and have not been updated to help match the supported formats from newer codecs that have become popular. so UMS just thinks that if the extension matches then the TV must support that file, and when it doesn't is when it fails, but does give some compatibility.

When UMS does transcode an incompatible file, most Samsung TV's (can only confirm with my F series) disable FF and RWD. I found that it also disables that for anything being streamed over the network and only works if playing locally from USB.

Jumping to a specific time is possible though as a way round this. Select the search icon and choose "Search Time Bar". This was something I completely forgot about till fairly recently. Not sure it is there for transcoded video though.

Also Transcoding can cause the TV to show the incorrect length of the file because of the way the file is being created on the fly, so usually stays at 0:00:0 or 0:00:01.
If you set "SeekByTime = exclusive" in the conf that might show the correct time for transcoded video or might instead show a random length many hours long.

There maybe a better confs that will work for you but will need a little tweaking to tell UMS to use it. I'll have a look into updating one for you later, but you will have to do the testing yourself.
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by mik_s »

Give this one a try, it was originally the Samsung-H4500.conf but I altered it to match yours. Hopefully it should work better as all the existing ones for the H series are very similar.

I might see if I can do a generic one for the H series that can replace the model specific ones.
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diablo75
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by diablo75 »

mik_s wrote: Sat Mar 27, 2021 11:43 am Give this one a try, it was originally the Samsung-H4500.conf but I altered it to match yours. Hopefully it should work better as all the existing ones for the H series are very similar.

I might see if I can do a generic one for the H series that can replace the model specific ones.
Hi, thanks for the conf file. I gave it a try, hopefully I did this correctly. What I did was click on the TV within the detected media renderers under the Status tab. This pops up a window that had shown that it appeared to be using a file called "Samsung-NotCD.conf". There was a little button next to this with a [+] sign in it which if you hovered over said "Customize this device" and when clicked it asks you where you want to save a new conf file using a new name "[TV]SamsungLED32-0f7f49.conf" which it placed in C:\ProgramData\UMS\renderers. I then appended the contents of the conf file you uploaded into this file and saved it, and then reloaded UMS. I then tried testing playback of the same video I've had trouble with and noticed no change; the same abrupt stop still occurs. Was there a different way I should have tried to implement the new custom config? Perhaps I should have made a backup of the NotCD conf file and then overwritten the contents with your conf file instead?

I've noticed that now at the top when I click on the TV under renderers the new conf file ([TV]SamsungLED32-0f7f49.conf) is shown but instead of a plus sign to the right to customize like before, there is now a button to the left that says "open parent configuration" which is the NotCD conf file that was up top originally. I'm not sure if it still has influence as a parent config? I assume that if I wanted to revert back to how it was before is to close UMS and delete this new conf file out of the programdata\ums\renderers folder?

What should I try next?
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by mik_s »

Just copy the conf file to C:\Program Files (x86)\Universal Media Server\renderers and restart UMS, in theory that should make UMS use that conf for your TV.
You will have to delete the custom "[TV]SamsungLED32-0f7f49.conf" from C:\ProgramData\UMS\renderers that you made otherwise UMS will only use that one for that TV.

If you check the icon for your TV in UMS it should say "Samsung UN32H5203" and clicking on it you should be able to see if it's using the correct conf.

Another thing you could do is to see if that file will play on your TV without transcoding. try playing the file from the #--TRANSCODE--# and choose "no transcoding"
If the file plays then the supported formats in the conf is wrong, if it doesn't then it should be transcoded.

Also try out the other options to force a transcode using FFmpeg or MEncoder. If non of those play it well you might have to tweak the transcoding settings in the conf, I'm not an expert at that so could take some trial and error to get right.

Give that a try and post more logs if you still have problems
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diablo75
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by diablo75 »

mik_s wrote: Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:51 am Just copy the conf file to C:\Program Files (x86)\Universal Media Server\renderers and restart UMS, in theory that should make UMS use that conf for your TV.
You will have to delete the custom "[TV]SamsungLED32-0f7f49.conf" from C:\ProgramData\UMS\renderers that you made otherwise UMS will only use that one for that TV.

If you check the icon for your TV in UMS it should say "Samsung UN32H5203" and clicking on it you should be able to see if it's using the correct conf.

Another thing you could do is to see if that file will play on your TV without transcoding. try playing the file from the #--TRANSCODE--# and choose "no transcoding"
If the file plays then the supported formats in the conf is wrong, if it doesn't then it should be transcoded.

Also try out the other options to force a transcode using FFmpeg or MEncoder. If non of those play it well you might have to tweak the transcoding settings in the conf, I'm not an expert at that so could take some trial and error to get right.

Give that a try and post more logs if you still have problems
I deleted the conf file that was created and placed in c:\ProgramData\UMS\renderers, and made sure the new conf file was in c:\Program Files (x86)\Universal Media Server\renderers along side all of the other config files (did both of these things while UMS was not running) and restarted UMS. The custom config is no longer being used, but it has looks to have reverted back to using the original Samsung-NotCD.conf file. I'm attaching a screenshot of what I see when I click on the TV.
Capture.JPG
Capture.JPG (67.07 KiB) Viewed 4809 times
I also already tried playback with no transcoding as well as every other transcoding method available. Details are in my OP and the trancelog posted earlier, but basically FFmpeg, Mencoder and VLC are able to play, but they all fail in the same way (playback ends about 10 or 15 seconds in. Avisynth and tsmuxer do not play at all.
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by mik_s »

It must be the transcoding settings that are not quite right if it stops when transcoding. I had another look at your log and there is a connection reset that is stopping it. Usually because the TV is not liking the data that it is receiving. Could also be network bandwidth issues but more likely to be the conf.

I double checked that conf and I think I put the search string in the wrong section :oops: try this one, just delete the old one.
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diablo75
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by diablo75 »

mik_s wrote: Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:04 pm I double checked that conf and I think I put the search string in the wrong section :oops: try this one, just delete the old one.
Well the good news is this config file was grabbed automatically after restarting UMS, but the bad news is there's still no change in the problem. I haven't tried making any tweaks within config files yet, I don't know where to start but I'll see if I can find a guide tomorrow.

Edit: I just wanted to add that it seems like the only videos I've found that exhibit this problem are mkv files.
diablo75
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Re: Playback of certain videos on Samsung TV stop about 15 seconds after starting with multiple transcoders

Post by diablo75 »

Ok, while I haven't made progress with using UMS to correctly playback these troublesome mkv videos to my TV, I have confirmed that if I use VLC to convert these videos using encoding profile titled "Video for MPEG4 1080p TV/device", which if you open up shows the encapsulation method as MP4/MOV, the video codec as H-264 at 3500kbps, the audio codec as [email protected], the output video not only plays back correctly but also shows itself as an mp4 file instead of an mpeg file, the TV knows how long the full video is and I can transport back and forth in the video while playing it back.

So, worst case, if I can't get UMS to do this on the fly for me (and I probably won't; I wish these config files were replaced with some sort of GUI based profile editor that would let me enable or disable a bunch of check boxes and enter various parameters that way) then I will just batch transcode these files in advanced with VLC or Handbrake or something.
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