Android: An error occured while attemping to play this video. Please try restarting both the Plex Media Server and this app

[zynine-]

Symptoms:

Attempting to play a channel leads to an error message:

An error occured while attemping to play this video. Please try restarting both the Plex Media Server and this app.

Cause:

This happens when the Android device have Audio -> Device supports Dolby Digital disabled in Plex Android setting. Enabling the option will lead to no audio playback on devices that doesn't support AC3 (eg. HTC M7), while devices with AC3 codecs plays fine (eg. HTC 10).

Detailed Analysis:

Plex Media Server 0.9.17.x and above changed the way codecs are used. On Windows 10, PMS uses Media Foundation instead of FFMPEG and the codec doesn't seem to transcode to AAC (from AC3).

Resolution:

Modify the audioCodec in Android.xml, located in the Plex Media Server\Resources\Profiles folder to force transcoding from AC3 to MP3:

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mpegts" codec="h264" audioCodec="aac" context="streaming">

to

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mpegts" codec="h264" audioCodec="mp3" context="streaming">

Test on HTC M7 (Android 5) and HTC 10 (Android 6) on PMS 1.1.4 (Win10) by zynine

Applies to

• Plex for Android (devices without AC3 support)
• PMS 0.9.17 to PMS 1.1.x as of 21Sep2016