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

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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 76282 times

Screenshot 2025-04-29 044325.png (27.38 KiB) Viewed 76282 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.

[yawa]

Hello @mik_s, many thanks for your feedback! I've tried to play the video from the #--TRANSCODE--# folder, I found 5 or 6 options there, but none of them worked.

I didn't try to adjust the conf file, because I checked some other videos and I realizied that the cause of my issue is apparently NOT the size, but perhaps something else.

Could you please take a look at the following test case? There are two videos GH011093.MP4 and GH011094.MP4, both in the folder /GoPro/Chateau 03-2025. They are both 4K videos, please find the screenshot attached, but the first one can be played on my TV, while the second one is being shown as MPG file with 0 byte size (please find photo attached) and can't be played. I hope that fresh log files will help. Many thanks!

Screenshot 2025-05-04 185351.png (90.91 KiB) Viewed 75080 times

TV.jpeg (247.39 KiB) Viewed 75080 times

[mik_s]

Video "GH011094.MP4" is not streamed due to the bitrate being higher than the estimated bitrate to the TV

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Renderer [TV] Samsung Q90 has an estimated network speed of 63.04853333333334 Mb/s

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File "GH011094.MP4" will not be streamed because the bitrate (64779664 b/s) is too high (63000000 b/s).

The TV also has a max bitrate that it is able to play for h264 set at 60Mb/s so it would not be able to play even if the speed was faster.

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Matched support line f:mp4  v:h264  a:ac3|lpcm|adpcm|aac-lc|he-aac|wma|eac3|mp3  m:video/mp4  w:4096  h:2160  b:600000000  se:ASS|MICRODVD|SAMI|SUBRIP|TEXT|TX3G  si:TX3G

You can see the specs here and your TV is in group 23TV_PREMIUM3

For this one it will work if you re-encode to h265 as that can handle the higher bitrate of 80Mb/s.

All of the other videos that show in the logs do match and are streamed unaltered.

If attempting to play from the #--TRANSCODE--# folder and the option "no transcoding" does not work on the TV then it confirms it is unable to play in this format so UMS is correct in trying to transcode. The tricky part is getting the transcoding options correct and doing this for 4k take a lot of processing that most computers cannot keep up with unless very powerful. Setting up for the GPU to do the transcoding will help a lot.

It may be better to re-encode them yourself using tools like handbrake or MKVtools into a format that can just be streamed.


I forgot to mention the reason why the videos show as 0 bytes on the TV is because they do not exist yet.
It is only when transcoding is started that data is being sent and there is no way to estimate the size beforehand.

[yawa]

Hey @mik_s

thank you for your feedback!

Regarding resolution / bitrate. Well, this might be the reason, but I tried yet another media servers like the Windows built-in and Emby - all these videos can be streamed on my TV without any problem. I don't know why, but it doesn't look like an issue with my TV, still I guess that something could be improved in UMS, epecially regarding UX. Yes, your suggestion concerning TRANSCODE is working pretty well, but it's not "comfortable" and looks like kind of workaround.

Concerning my second issue (files with 0 bytes): this is not only about videos, but also about images. Attached please find fresh log files, please look for DSC_8557.JPG - this is an example of an image which is being shown with "0 bytes" and can't be shown on my TV, although this is just a simple JPG. It's really annoying that this image (and many others!) have not been indexed obviously, although UMS is running on my PC since several monthes and UMS should have already indexed everything. Well, I've got more than 100K of images, anyway ...

What do you think?

Many thanks in advance!
Cheers,
Wladimir

[mik_s]

I don't know what Emby is doing but it may be transcoding anyway.
If the TV can play these when not transcoding then the conf will need to be tweaked to allow these.

The JPG images are being sent to the TV unaltered but I think the problem is not with the JPGs. You have raw NEF files with the same name that the TV cannot display so these will be transcoded and show as 0 bytes. The TV may also be mixing them up if it does not show the extension as otherwise they have the same filename.

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Matched format JPG to "D:\Photos\2020 Фотоархив\2020 03 15 Вова Пробы Фотоспринт\DSC_8557.JPG"
Final verdict: "DSC_8557.JPG" will be streamed because no compatible engine was found
Matched format RAW to "D:\Photos\2020 Фотоархив\2020 03 15 Вова Пробы Фотоспринт\DSC_8557.NEF"
Final verdict: "DSC_8557.NEF" will be transcoded with transcodingSettings "DCRaw (MPEGTS-H264-AC3)" with mime type "image/jpeg"

This is failing to work though

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net.pms.encoders.DCRaw Decoding image "D:\Photos\2020 Фотоархив\2020 03 15 Вова Пробы Фотоспринт\DSC_8557.NEF" with DCRaw
net.pms.io.ProcessWrapperImpl Starting "C:\Program Files\Universal Media Server\bin\dcrawMS.exe" -c -M -w "D:\Photos\2020 Фотоархив\2020 03 15 Вова Пробы Фотоспринт\DSC_8557.NEF"
net.pms.io.OutputTextConsumer D:\Photos\2020 ?????????\2020 03 15 ???? ????? ??????????\DSC_8557.NEF: Invalid argument
net.pms.encoders.DCRaw DCRaw failed to decode image "D:\Photos\2020 Фотоархив\2020 03 15 Вова Пробы Фотоспринт\DSC_8557.NEF": D:\Photos\2020 ?????????\2020 03 15 ???? ????? ??????????\DSC_8557.NEF: Invalid argument
net.pms.network.mediaserver.servlets.MediaServerServlet Input stream returned for "JPEG_SM_DSC_8557.NEF" was null, no image will be sent to renderer

I don't know anything about RAW image files so I don't know what is wrong here.
Maybe DCRaw does not like the Cyrillic characters as they show as ?

This should not stop JPGs from working, maybe if their are separated from the NEFs it will work.
You could try a test folder that does not use Cyrillic letters with these in and see if it works

[yawa]

Thanks @mik_s! I'm sure this is not a problem. Look, in the same folder having cyrillic chars I've got a lot of images. All of them (!) do exist twice (as JPG and as NEF/RAW). My TV shows in the folder list just JPGs, but not NEFs, which is ok for me. Now, some of JPGs are being shown correctly with their thumbnails, but not all of them - the rest are being shown as "placeholders". Some JPGs can be shown correctly in full screen view, the rest can't be shown at all (TV says smth like "network error" or smth like this).