Videos Will Not Play or Stutter | easyCMS Digital Signage

Video is where cheap hardware shows its limits. A file that plays perfectly on your laptop can be black, skipped or juddering on the screen. The player hands decoding to the device’s own hardware, and every device supports different formats.

Start with the file, re-encode it

The one format recommended on every platform we sell is H.264 video in an MP4 container. The rest of the profile below is our own conservative starting point, and re-encoding to it clears most problems:

Setting	Utiliser	Pourquoi
Container	MP4, faststart on	Plays on every platform we sell
Video codec	H.264, Main profile	Avoid H.265/HEVC, VP9 and AV1 unless you have tested that device
Résolution	1920 × 1080	And no larger than the area it plays in
Bitrate	2–6 Mbps	Very high bitrates are a common cause of judder
Fréquence d'images	25 or 30 fps, constant	Variable frame rate confuses low-power decoders
Audio	AAC, 128 kbps stereo	Keep it even on a silent video: an unusual audio track can fail the whole file

HandBrake is free and does all of this, and re-encoding is faster than diagnosing. Swap the new version into the playlist, see Playlists and the Media Library.

It plays in the preview but not on the screen

The preview uses your computer’s codecs. The screen uses a low-power decoder.

Good to know A file that previews fine and fails on the screen is almost always a codec problem, not a CMS one. On Windows the player relies on the codecs Windows itself has, and adding a codec pack to force one file through can destabilise the machine.

On Android the player records what it could not decode under Faultlist on its status screen, and reports such a file as Unsupported Video. The entry stays until the player restarts, so restart after uploading a fixed version. The Windows status screen does not list faulted media at all, see Reading the Player Status Window.

4K on Android

An Android player does not render a 4K layout at 4K: the interface, images and web content are rendered at 1080p and upscaled to the panel, only video decodes natively at 4K. Reporting such a screen as 1920 x 1080 is the rendering resolution, not a fault.

So build a 1920 x 1080 layout with a 4K-encoded video inside. A 3840 x 2160 layout gains you nothing and is a common cause of a black video. See Screen Resolution and Orientation.

Decoder settings worth changing on Android

Open Displays, use the row menu for the screen, click Edit, go to the Settings tab and scroll to the bottom. Tick the Override box beside a setting, then save.

Video Engine: ExoPlayer or Android Media Player. Older SoC panels, and Philips devices on Android 7 or earlier, often only behave on the latter.
Use Multiple Video Decoders: turn off on low-cost hardware. A device that cannot sustain two decoders plays one video and shows black for the second.
Use a SurfaceView for Video Rendering?: worth toggling when the video is black but the audio plays.
Hardware Accelerate web content: only for video inside an embedded page.

Change one setting at a time and let the player restart before judging it. The per-screen Override needs no administrator rights, but the shared profile behind it is held centrally, so ask us at Send a support request to change every screen at once.

Why it judders rather than fails

Stutter is the device being asked for more than it can give. A SoC screen such as an LG webOS panel has far less decode headroom than a dedicated Android or Windows player, so treat 1080p at a modest bitrate as the ceiling. Two videos playing at once defeat many low-cost players, and a heavy overlay or embedded webpage costs the same headroom, see Webpages and Embedded HTML on a Display.

Storage matters too, because video is read from local storage as it plays. On Android the library location is chosen on the device, in the player’s own settings, not in the CMS. If video stutters from internal storage try external or SD, and from a card try internal, a worn card judders on its own.

A video that never starts

The file has not finished downloading. A partial video plays as nothing at all, and a large file over a slow link takes hours, see Content Never Changes.
The device has run out of space, so the download never completes. Make the player discard its local copies and fetch them again: Displays, the row menu, Edit, the Advanced tab, tick Clear Cached Data and save. Never delete a player’s files by hand.
The account library is full, see Storage Quota and Media Uploads.

Which kind of black screen

If the layout draws correctly and only the video is black, it is a decode problem. If the whole screen is black the player has stopped or never started, see Black Screens and Player Crashes. If a re-encoded 1080p file will not play alone in an empty layout, send it to us at Send a support request.