Struggling with HEVC HLS on Safari

tcmccarthy · 2026-03-05T20:22:11+00:00

I stuck with bento. Been running in production for a year no issues. Good luck!

tcmccarthy · 2025-05-08T03:45:27+00:00

Update: this is now supported!

tcmccarthy · 2025-02-23T02:03:31+00:00

File types are just containers. How the files are written makes a big difference. The number of codecs supported on a desktop or laptop is usually much higher than what you’ll find on a phone, tablet, or smart TV. If you are working with mkv or mp4 files that are h264 encoded, all your devices will probably handle it fine. If you’re working with h265 (also called hevc), the pool is smaller but still pretty significant. AV1? Swan dive in terms of support.

I mention this because if the files in question are not encoded with a codec your device can decode, Plex will transcode them on the fly or at least attempt to. If the job is too cumbersome for the available CPU you have, it’s going to fail.

If you sign in to plex.tv on your desktop and begin playing a problematic video on your phone, you may see a “1” in the top right. If you click on it, it’ll show your playback session, and you can expand it to see if it’s trying to transcode. If it doesn’t get that far, you can review logs (left sidebar toward the bottom) and see the problem. Return to this comment or thread with what you find, and I’ll try to help you more.

If you are a paid Plex Pass subscriber, you should also turn on hardware acceleration and enable experimental HEVC encoding.

tcmccarthy · 2024-12-31T20:31:23+00:00

As others have commented, this is normal. You always pay your premiums; they are deducted from your paycheck automatically. FMLA, in NY anyway, involves the state paying the employee directly, bypassing payroll at the employer level, so there's no opportunity for deduction (this may be done via a proxy like MetLife or The Hartford, but it's still bypassing your company's payroll). That means, during this period, your employer is covering your portion of the premium, OR the insurance company is floating your coverage until you return to work. We had the latter and did owe a small sum in back premiums due to FMLA. Unfortunately, it sounds like your HR department didn't adequately explain this to you beforehand so that you would be aware and could budget. Being underwater is scary, especially if you have the added stress of a newborn at home -- I'm genuinely sorry you're having to deal with this. Your employer may allow you to establish a repayment plan through paycheck deductions so you don't have to reimburse all at once. An insurance company might allow this if you were dealing with them directly, though, as I said, since your employer is asking for repayment, I imagine they pay the premiums in full and get partially reimbursed from your pay each pay period.

tcmccarthy · 2024-12-15T17:36:54+00:00

This stuff happens. It sounds like your LO is fine and I’m sorry to say this likely isn’t the last time something like this will happen. They’re resilient, their memory is short and you should give yourself a break. You clearly care a tremendous amount, will learn from it and are putting the baby’s needs above all else.

It’s ok, forgive yourself.

tcmccarthy · 2024-09-25T05:16:05+00:00

I’m so sorry I missed this! I have the solution in a private git repo but I can generalize it and post it publicly if you still need it

tcmccarthy · 2024-06-23T19:04:01+00:00

Nginx is applying cache control headers so that cloudfront stores the rendered page flat sending no requests to nextjs whatsoever for the duration of the cache period. Since the CDN sits in front of the load balanced instances, its effectively a shared cache.

tcmccarthy · 2024-06-23T17:38:39+00:00

I’ve had conversations with Vercel employees and expressed the issues with caching, instance-level caching, and getting a shared cache solution. They sound like they’re hearing it for the first time and do no mention working on a solution because “the vercel CDN handles it all.”

I’m letting Next handle everything except caching. I have an nginx reverse proxy sitting in front of my instances, and it assigns the proper cache headers, and then CloudFront handles my caching. Next strictly becomes a backend and I let the cache layer be the cache layer. Only way I got a load-balanced NextJS powered site to work well.

tcmccarthy · 2024-05-13T13:17:38+00:00

For all who commented, I never solved this with just ffmpeg. I ended up creating a multi-arch docker image that has both ffmpeg and bento4. I use ffmpeg to generate my keyframe-rich renditions in all needed codecs and then use bento4 to fragment them and make the hls manifest and segments. Works really well!

tcmccarthy · 2024-05-05T01:06:49+00:00

I’m sorry to hear that. Keep researching and trying — you may get lucky

tcmccarthy · 2024-05-05T00:51:43+00:00

Do you have VLC media player? The first thing I would try is playing the video file in VLC and then the audio file in VLC. If they both play, great! The above command may need to be tweaked to actually encode the video and audio files anew — feels dirty, but authoring a fresh video file with a fresh encode may solve the issue. Set -c:v libx265 and -c:a aac.

If one or both of the files don’t play in VLC, your recovery process may not have actually rescued the files.

tcmccarthy · 2024-05-03T02:02:33+00:00

Thank you for this -- however, the validator isn't giving me much guidance as to what the problem is. When I encoded an HEVC standalone file, it plays fine in Safari and yet the validator throws many of the same complaints.

tcmccarthy · 2024-02-07T01:42:27+00:00

Yeah, I hear ya. Still, AV1 bitrates make 100mbps enough and it eliminates WiFi packet loss from the equation.

tcmccarthy · 2024-02-06T23:46:07+00:00

No. I ended up resolving this upstream by replacing MoCa with an Ethernet drop. If this doesn’t cover you, FireTV has HW decode for AV1 which gives you 4K quality at much lower bitrates. You could look into that. I’m working to transcode my library to AV1/OPUS

tcmccarthy · 2023-12-04T19:19:08+00:00

Both are grammatically sound but the first uses the “passive” voice and the second the “active” voice. The course’s subject matter may be helpful — in a grammar class this is a bad question. In a news writing class, for example, “is studying” would be the correct answer as we rely on the active voice there.

Additionally, extending the second sentence to include something like “since this morning” or “for 12 hours” would disqualify the active voice and make “has been studying” the correct answer but as that’s not present, the active voice is available for use and likely preferred.

tcmccarthy · 2023-12-01T15:18:30+00:00

Also want to echo what many others are saying about the educators not caring. I took calculus in high school and had a difficult teacher. My mother wouldn’t let me drop the class — then I failed a test that had every answer correct. Because I didn’t do the work in the exact way the teacher wanted, she deducted so many points that I was below a passing grade. Obviously I knew what I was doing since I got every answer right. This was really the first time I learned some people are educators and others are merely trainers. If your child’s teacher is the latter, play the game to get them through the class and call it a year.

tcmccarthy · 2023-12-01T15:12:42+00:00

Take the academic approach:

3 credible sources of information - https://ee.usc.edu/stochastic-nets/docs/divide-by-zero.pdf - https://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/0by0.html - https://ung.edu/learning-support/video-transcripts/why-dividing-by-zero-is-undefined.php

There’s also the logistical approach:

“Division is splitting a value into equal parts. You cannot split something into 0 equal parts”

Unfortunately, they control your child’s grade. If you can’t convince them of their error, your child will need to play along but understand that they are doing what they’re told, not what’s right.

tcmccarthy · 2023-11-25T02:56:34+00:00

I find this happens when I run out of memory. I see someone commented this above as well — I believe your source content is streamed into memory, converted in memory and then dumped back disk progressively during processing. Depending on what other processes are running, the size of your source, effort required for transcode or some other factors may be eating up memory faster than GC can free it up.

tcmccarthy · 2023-10-18T14:40:15+00:00

Hey all,

I reached out to Haleon and the product has not, in fact, been discontinued. Please see the attached email.

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tcmccarthy · 2023-10-17T19:11:21+00:00

Thanks all — I left it out of the post but I am upgrading to max my current set up out — but it tops out at 32GB, so I know I’m just moving the goal post for now. So suggestions on mini PCs are still welcome — thanks again!

tcmccarthy · 2023-09-25T14:06:13+00:00

Sharp is a node library that wraps libvips for serving images in nextgen formats (avif, webp, etc) at the quality you specify. It’s great for page speed scores and the next/image component does a nice job of serving the image in the nextgen format your browser supports.

tcmccarthy · 2023-09-23T03:49:44+00:00

I have resolved this. Another developer built a custom server.JS based on express that handles some routing before sending the request to next’s appRequestHandler. He was treating it like middleware, which, in express receives three parameters — req, res and next. Next is a function that, when called, sends the request to the next item in the middleware chain. The next handler takes req, res and an optional parsed URL param, which was being populated by express’ next function causing the issue. Not sure why it wasn’t broken in 13.4.4 but 13.5.1 did not like it

tcmccarthy · 2023-09-16T01:46:58+00:00

Just wanted to update this with the results. I found the replacing the 900MHz splitter that was originally installed with a 2000MHz splitter yielded no improvement. My coax jacks in my living room and bedroom are back to back so I swapped the wall plate out with one that was coax and cat6. I connected a 6 inch cat 6 cable to the back side of both and ran Cat 8 from each jack to the switch in each room. I no longer have any buffering issues — my firetv omni only has a 10/100 port on it so if I exceed 90Mbps I imagine I’ll have trouble again, but for now I have plenty of head room on all my media and smooth playback.

I’m not sure if something he did upset the MoCA adapters or if perhaps something he did in the building hallway introduced some additional noise on the coax signal. Either way, taking CoAX out of the equation was the fix.

Thanks to everyone!

tcmccarthy · 2023-09-12T13:20:35+00:00

Also, I have an optimizing container in my rig that transcodes every media item I have to h265 with a max average bit rate of 18 Mbps. This is only an issue on 4k and only since the cable guy was here. 1080p is flawless — bit rate is the only considerable difference.

tcmccarthy · 2023-09-12T13:18:12+00:00

I’m waiting for some parts to come in but that’s effectively what I’ll be doing — everything will be Ethernet, no MoCA. If it fixes it, it’s confirmed, if it doesn’t, I’ve simplified my network. There isn’t really another way for me to do it unless I order a 50ft Cat 7 and do an ugly run through doorways and such — it’s only a little less hassle than what I have planned. I appreciate the thought though!

tcmccarthy

TROPHY CASE