MP4 are being recognized as MPG and don't play

[yawa]

Hi there,

I've got a following issue: having a shared folder with some videos on my PC (basically with my GoPro recordings), I try to play them on my Samsung Smart TV using it as a client with the built-in Media Server player. All of these files are regular .MP4 files basically, but I realize that some of them are being recognized and shown in the gallery as .MPG files on my TV (with the size of 0 Bytes!) and don't play, I get just an error message like "can't play, please check your network connection). Known issue?

P.S. I'm running 14.12.0 on my Windows PC.

Many thanks in advance!

[mik_s]

Something about those videos or the conf file for your TV is causing UMS to transcode those videos as it thinks they are unsupported.

To be able to see why I will need to see logs. See the section in red above.

[yawa]

Hello @mik_s,

thank you! Yes, sure, here we go. Log files please find attached. My smart TV client is "[TV] Samsung Q90" and I've just tried to play the file GX010197.MP4 (shown as GX010197.MPG on my TV) from the /GoPro shared folder with the issue described above. Thanks for assistance!

[mik_s]

That video is being transcoded as the width is too large for the TV

Code: Select all

Video width "5312" failed to match support line f:mp4    v:h265    a:ac3|lpcm|adpcm|aac-lc|he-aac|wma|eac3|mp3  m:video/mp4    w:4096   h:2160   b:1000000000   se:ASS|MICRODVD|SAMI|SUBRIP|TEXT|TX3G   si:TX3G

Because of this it has to be scaled down to fit 4096x2160 for the TV to play it.
The transcoding profile is set to use MPEGTS-H264-AC3 which may not be suitable for 4K videos and MPEGTS-H265-AC3 might work better if the TV supports this.
This can be changed in the conf file

Transcoding 4K does take a lot of processing so your computer may not be able to do it in real-time, this could by why the TV is failing to play it.
If you have a GPU that has a video encoder you can enable this in the transcoding settings for FFmpeg.

Screenshot 2025-04-29 044347.png (7.76 KiB) Viewed 47 times

Screenshot 2025-04-29 044325.png (27.38 KiB) Viewed 47 times

It may be possible that the video can be streamed unaltered and the TV will just crop it to fit.
Try playing from the #--TRANSCODE--# folder and choose "no transcoding". You will have to enable this folder in the settings as it is currently hidden.