I recent got a new chromecast 4K. I’ve installed the plex app and tried playing a movie I have that is 1080p, 12.2Mbs, and it is was horribly pixelated, like it was too low bitrate. It was set to direct play.
I tried the same movie on my Sony android tv and it was crystal clear.
It’s not buffering at all and is direct playing, so it’s not a bandwidth issue. Any idea what the issue could be or how I can debug this?
The movie was sin city and has a lot of black and white so the pixelation is very noticeable
“optimizing” something in Plex will always transcode the file into a new version. So I wouldn’t really consider that as a solution because you would potentially transcode and compress a file or, even worse, compress a file from, for example, H.265 into H.265 so a more efficient compression to less efficient compression.
But since it works with a transcode I am wondering if there isn’t some issue with the container. I have seen a few instances in which just a remuxing of the file without doing anything to the video and audio tracks solved an issue. Maybe the version was poorly muxed.
So you could try using MKVToolnix to try that out.
I’ll try remuxing. But it’s currently direct playing (not even direct streaming) so it can clearly handle the container. Maybe it’s processor just struggles with this bitrate, but it’s supposed to be the 4K version
I wasn’t really talking about the capability of playing or supporting the container but that the container itself has some issues, something that would explain the problems you describe.
I have seen this before where a file was playing directly but was stuttering, I ran it through MKVToolnix to remux it and it worked (though I think it was an MP4 before) after that without issues.
So even if the container is supported it might still have some issues depending on how it was created.