VortexWalker wrote:

I've already ruled out my internet connection and computer being the problem as I've also tried downloading at friends and on different platforms (iMac, MacBook, Ubuntu 22.04 and Windows 10), and re-downloading the same file from the same source gives the same problems at the same places.

realityshow wrote:

Hi VortexWalker,
Whilst i dont own a Samsung TV i can tell you the best setting for handbrake to hopefully get it to play.

When you re-encode it, under the video tab where it says frame rate change this to constant frame rate instead of peak frame rate this should help tremendously and fix bad frames.

Other than that cant think of anything other than maybe get a very long HDMI cable to plug PC into TV (tho also be wary and find out which hdmi cable u need as i accidently bought a hdmi 1.4 cable one time tho my graphics card was hdmi 2.0 which did not work)

phunpsyz wrote:

I'll give it a try
what's the source file; and timestamps of the problem areas would be useful as well?

edit:  what codec and container are you wanting?

VortexWalker wrote:

Finally tracked the problem down, when it suddenly started happening again, to the client I was using - qBittorrent.  Even though the downloads where showing 100% complete, when I force checked them, they werew between 98% and 99%.  Now switched to using Transmission and the problem has gone away.

isto wrote:

Hi everyone,

since I'm not allowed (yet) to create posts, I will bump on this post, which I believe is the most related to my issue - sorry in advance for the bump

I've have an issue with x264 movies or tv series from GalaxyRG[TGX] releases, 1080p or 480p it doesn't matter.

when I play the video files on my Samsung TV it doens't work, no errors, just don't play it
when I use Plex on my Samsung TV, some movies don't play and TV gets back to Plex home screen, others stay blocked loading...
when I play the same video files on my PC it works fine, with VLC or Plex client.

when I use videos from other releases, such as RARBG, ION10 or YTS it works fine, TV and Plex on TV is ale to play them without issues.

I checked 1 working video file and 1 non working file, and only saw difference within the audio codec.
working video has MP4A
non working video has A52 (AC3)


anyone faced similar issues?
any suggestions?

EDIT:
I made some more tests, and it seems that the issue is the subtitle name that is too long.
I've removed the subtitles with mkvmerge --no-subtitles and it worked. (no other changes on audio, video or even mkv container)
GalaxyRG
would it be possible to reduce the name of the subtitles, in most cases is the movie entire name, in others is "Galaxy TV - small excellence!!"

meanwhile will find a way to automate the removal of subtitles...

isto wrote:

thanks for your reply Barharmar

I made some more tests today and actually subtitles is not the issue for me, neither the long name of each stream (audio, video or subtitles).

If I run mkvmerge -o movie-af.mkv movie-bf.mkv
it works, it stays with all subtitles and everything like the original video, but I noticed that the size is a bit smaller.

I tried with episode 1 season 6 of black mirror, the original file has 240.9MiB, after running the above command, the output file has 240.3MiB... so is like something is removed.
I've used mkvToolNix, and the content is the same

I've tried to  use Tdarr to clean-up subtitles and metadata for audio & video, but no luck, it still not working after using Tdarr.
it seems that mkvmerge is doing something that fixes my issue

so my next step was to check the file content, I have used an HEX editor, and noticed that the file after mkvmerge has made some changes on the beginning of the file, like it changed some header information

feel free to suggest or give any hints

isto wrote:

very good points, I saw that some users in the past had issues with that
if it was an issue with the torrent, then other releases such as RARBG, YTS, ION10 will have the same issue, which is not the case, so my guess is not related with torrent download client.

then if it was dolby audio, which could be, but how come that just running mkvmerge without any arguments fix it? and when checking the audio stream is always AAC
surely there's something that Samsung TV doesn't like, I would like to understand the reason...

isto wrote:

thanks Barharmar

I'm afraid if I use mkv tools to extract audio and/or video it will work, since when I use mkvmerge with no arguments fix the issue.
mkv tools are doing something into my file, making it working without no encoding or anything else - the mkvmerge command takes around 30s to run on a 1.4Gb file...

I had put in place a workaround, a cron job that will run mkvmerge for mkv videos - is my safest option at the moment.
although there's no explanation for my issue, this workaround is enough to me.
thanks for suggestions and brainstorming.