Serviio

I have a bunch of HEVC MKV files that play fine on my TV via USB local playback. But when I try to play these via Serviio... my LG TV just reports "Unable to Play". However, if I use FFMPEG to change these to MP4 (without re-encoding) these HEVC MP4 files play fine.

Serviio is using Generic DLNA profile but same thing happens when I try LG TV profile.

I'm running latest version of Serviio 2.4 so not sure what's going on.

I checked PROFILES.XML and noticed it has HEVC_MP4 but not HEVC_MKV. When I try to manually create HEVC_MKV I get an error when trying to run Serviio "java.lang.RuntimeException: org.serviio.profile.ProfilesDefinitionException: Profile 1 has invalid media format profile HEVC_MKV"

Any suggestions on how get MKV HEVC working without enabling Transcoding?

Thanks.

Update: It seems to work fine if I remux the MKV through MKVToolNix. Previously these MKV files were created in FFMPEG so maybe it didn't create a proper MKV.

Yeah, you don't want to transcode H.265 to a different codec. That would take a lot of computer power. My first suggestion is to try a few different profiles to see if one works correctly. I suggest trying the Roku 4K TV profile, as it should passthrough any H.265 video untouched and I know it works with MKV files.

I just tested my LG Nano85 with some HEVC files, and they all played fine (other than the ones with unsupported audio codecs, so no sound). This includes 1080p BT709 and 4K/BT2020 video, again all with HEVC/H.265 video codecs. I checked my Serviio console to be sure, and it is using the LG profile included with Serviio.

Personally, I despise the media players that today's smart TVs include. I have maybe 8-10 smart TVs in my home, and they all have an external player: Roku or Nvidia Shield on most of them, and a Fire TV Cube and Onn 4K Media player on one. Each and every one of them are vastly superior to what the TV uses to play videos.