Problems with the Newest TV Shows

[TanMan]

I download TV shows, store them on my RAID arrays, and stream them using Emby. I used to get 1080p x264 episodes, but for the past few years, I've been getting 1080p x265 episodes. I get a bitrate around 3mb/s so that I can stream it over my internet connection. If I can't get that lower bitrate, I get a higher bitrate copy and transcode it using ffmpeg.

This has worked flawlessly for years. But recently, new TV shows have been a problem. One example is Plur1bus. The video looks like it's losing sync and gets all garbled. It gets better for a second or two, then gets garbled again. But the audio is fine. I originally thought it was the bit rate, so I transcoded an episode to a lower bit rate - it looked less garbled, but it was still garbled.

I have good mesh wifi and a good signal through the house, and my family, who access Emby over the much slower internet, is also having the same problem. Like I said, everything old still streams fine. My TV's are new TCL 4K Google TV's (and a new FireStick in my older Samsung TV), and my kids have Samsung and LG TV's that are a few years old. And they stream Amazon and Netflix just fine. So it has to be something in the video itself.

I noticed that the newest x265 episodes I've been downloading are using 10-bit encoding for a larger color space. My TV's and Firesticks are new and should handle the 10-bit x265, but I thought maybe this was the problem. So I downloaded some encodes of Plur1bus that used 8-bit encoding, but the problem remained. So it's not the 10-bit encoding.

I tried a 4k x265 8-bit rip. That was horrible, So I reencoded it to 1080p. It was better, but still not good. I tried even lower resolutions (1280x720 and even 720x480), but it was still garbled in places. My older video that's 1080p x265 works fine, so there's got to be something different going on.

I've been thinking of adding much more frequent i-frames to the video, but I thought I should ask here before I tried it.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

[dannyboy48888]

Careful with talk of downloaded material. I'll assume you got it legitimately I.e. playon cloud capture. Try remuxing the source with mkvtoolnix and selecting only the track you need. A lot of times my captures will drift on playback randomly but never the same spot. After doing said advice they played fine.

[TanMan]

Thank you for your suggestion. But I finally figured out what the problem is.

I have a desktop with 4 RAID-5 arrays where I store my content and stream from. It turns out that one of the RAID arrays was failing, and when writing to it, a bit was frozen (staying on). This was corrupting anything I wrote to it. This RAID array was where most of the new shows were going, so that's why I thought it had to do with the newest shows.

So now have a new RAID-5 array and am copying all the content to it. All the older content is ok, and only the stuff in the last month or so has been corrupted. So I'll have to replace those files after the copy is done.

Thanks again for trying to help.