I usually turn on on a movie with my tablet when getting ready to go to sleep. I used to do Plex, and direct stream everything (local network) and get the same results with my draining battery as I did with Google Play Movies more or less. That’s streaming full blasting 1080p with Plex, and the dumbed down 1080p that streaming services use.
On my S3 Tab I can’t watch Direct Stream and not have my tablet die with Emby. I can’t watch any of the Lord of the Rings movies fully. I can’t even watch a little ol’ DVD sized movie and get much more battery.
There are two ways to watch on my tablet with Emby. Chrome, there I can’t fully Direct Stream because of audio codecs …. so in an effort to test if I can get a good movie stream and audio, and better battery, I reduced the streaming to 10mbps, the lowest 1080p I can stand, and my server should do the work with my tablet only requesting the stream and the transcoding the whole thing into a neater package.
The other way to watch on my tablet is with the Emby app from the Google Play Store. I can Direct Stream but it “sucks me tablet dry.” I put that down in mbps and down and down and down but still get that “too much power drawn” idea.
I keep going back to watch in Chrome, which for all intent and purpose is nearly the same, just some codec differences and the app feel is the same.
But the dirty part of this is worse, the newest updates broke how some subtitles are displayed, those work fine the the Emby App, but in Chrome, you can only see the top of the lines of text, never full text.
I don’t have any screenshots but this one:
Working on my Computer, in Windows I use Chrome mostly to watch Emby content. I don’t have Emby Theatre or any thing, only the Emby App on my phone and tablet. Watching the above movie I see the same problem. Stats for Nerds states it is transcoding the subtitles and so that’s part it. Before the Emby 4.01 server everything displayed fine watching ANY of my content.
So then here’s a screenshot I just took from my Android Emby App on my Note8:
Obviously I would need to get another screenshot from my Tablet using Chrome. As it goes, Chrome on Windows does the same thing, transcodes the subtitle since it’s not supported.
I have different formats for some movies, like if I prefer to maybe watch it on my phone I have a noblackbars version of some things. I also have Android specific kinds of versions for some larger movies. I also have some version of those with burned in subtitles to just avoid problems with some of them, but I sure don’t have everything done like that, it takes TIME and ENERGY and I’m running it then through Handbrake and most of my stuff is NOT put through there ever. Sigh. This is complicated and there is no way to just be happy with one thing ever. I was mostly happy with Plex but too much was so annoying as time went on and having better layout in Emby is great but … battery and subtitle muck-ups are worse than Plex extra mumbo jumbo and disappearing subtitles IMO.
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