UnicornTranscoder VS Exoplayer

Just having support for a remote transcoder, along the lines of unicorn transcoder or rffmpeg would be a good first step to let us start homebrewing a solution.

There's this project - https://github.com/UnicornTranscoder/UnicornTranscoder That lets you use a remote transcoder, but idk if the project is maintained anymore.

There are some projects to distribute transcoding jobs like the Unicorn Transcoder (last activity in 2021), Remote Transcoder (last activity in 2017) or the Kubernetes project (last activity in 2020)

Interesting, I wasn't aware they tweaked it so much. Projects like Unicorn Transcoder made it seem like you could just drop-in replace it with a different binary.

There was/is a Project for remote transcoding, the Unicorn Trancoder which might help but the last commit in that project was made in Oct. 2021.

On the other hand, there is a Project called Unicorn Transcoder which is to offload the transcoding job on a different machine. If that works with plex optimization or just the "on-the-fly" transcoder, I don't know.

I tried using the Fire TV but it has huge problems with some 4K HDR video formats that goes black screen. It is an issue reported by multiple users for Plex but it's the same for all applications on FireTV. This is the issue on github for Exoplayer: https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/issues/11096

Media3 is the new home for APIs that enable you to create rich audio and video experiences. If you’ve used libraries like ExoPlayer, MediaCompat, or Media2, you’ll find Media3 to be familiar. However, instead of using these separate libraries, Media3 provides a unified API for playback use-cases and also expands to cover new use-cases like video editing and transcoding. The APIs are simple to use yet powerful, customizable to meet your needs, and reliable and optimized so you can build for the diverse Android device ecosystem. (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/03/media3-is-ready-to-play.html)

Haven't done video work in years, but checkout the DefaultTrackSelector and start following around in the source code. Android Studio should allow you to do this all in the IDE. It's really the only way to learn/understand this stuff.

Also in regards to having to tell PC rtspt:// and Quest rtsp:// and waiting for ExoPlayer to fail over to TCP (8 seconds delay) https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/issues/11069

I wonder if it's an ExoPlayer bug?

See the full changelog of ExoPlayer 2.18.2. Some notable changes are:

This started happening on Android when they enabled DRM on the streams. Assuming you use a device with Android 12 or later, you can just use Race Control TV to fix the issue. With Android 11 or earlier, Race Control TV also stutters due to this issue, which can be fixed by a custom build of the the app and force-enabling the fix mentioned in the issue.

If one day https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/issues/3438 is done then yes. Until then no I can't.