Serviio

Hello!

I am running Serviio v1.4.1.2 on an old Windows XP Pro computer. I am facing some playback issues with certain .avi & .mkv files on my recently bought Song Bravia KDL-24W600A telly with the 'Sony Bravia TV (2013) profile whilst transcoding is set to 'Off' and all subtitles options are enabled. (The .avi files report a 'Playback Not Available' error and the .mkv files play with only sound and no picture ) However, on selecting the 'Sony Bravia TV (2012) - US' profile, the same set of files play fine however with transcoding enabled.

Given that it is an old PC with limited HDD space and memory, I would like the transcoding option to be 'Off' but (ideally) NOT face any issues with playback of these files and subtitles. Is this possible? Thanks in advance for any help offered.

Cheers!

If you disable transcoding, you must take care by yourself that all your files use only audio and video formats the tv supports. Because that's pretty much what transcoding does.

If Serviio resides on a thin machine, it might be a good idea to run all files the tv can't play through a suitable transcoding application like Vidcoder. You may want to look as well for an application that is able to mux/keep the video if the audio alone caused the playback problem.

This one time transcoding might still give you a better quality than Serviio's on-the-fly transcoding. But keep the original files, in case you decide to get a tv which is capable to play them in their full quality.

I don't use subtitles myself, so something I mentioned above could take a different turn if one takes subtitles into the equation.

You can't use subtitles without transcoding except for subtitles integrated in MKV file.
Since computer is weak, I recommend using MKV merge for this job, it will not transcode movie, but just join existing video file with subtitle in one MKV container that you can playback on TV.

Remuxing all necessary streams into an MKV container does not save the OP from looking into the audio and video codecs used, though, to make the files playable without having it transcoded by Serviio.