The State of LG TV Media Playback

[SubJunk]

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Almost 3 years ago (January 2023), we released a feature to enable LG TV owners to watch Dolby Vision content in MKV files, something that LG TVs did not support, and no other media server supported. It worked by losslessly remuxing the streams into a different container on the fly. A few months later, we made that behavior automatic, and we have rolled out other improvements to the feature since then to make it work better with seeking and subtitles.

At the time, we talked with LG support and requested they add native support, so we wouldn't have to do the remuxing.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, LG released WebOS 25 with native MKV Dolby Vision support! In addition to that, in 2023 they started supporting DTS in MKV too, which means that now we should finally have support for the most common files. This is a huge win BUT it is breaking people's TVs.

People are finding that after the WebOS 25 update, the LG Media Player app is running slowly, running out of memory and crashing, and that HDMI-ARC equipment like soundbars and receivers aren't working anymore.

We are monitoring the situation closely, waiting to see whether LG will fix these problems. For now, we will keep the behavior of UMS which is to remux, because that is less likely to crash the LG Media Player.

If they end up fixing the player, we will disable the automatic remuxing for those newer TVs that can install WebOS 25, and encourage you to update them. For those of you with LG TVs older than 2022, don't worry, we will continue to remux your DV MKV files so you can enjoy that glorious DV.

For now, our recommendation for the best experience with your LG TV if you are on WebOS 24 or older is do not let it update the firmware. If you have enabled automatic updating, disable that.

If you have already updated, when you use UMS with your DV MKVs, it should still work well (let us know!). However for non-DV MKVs, because UMS usually will not automatically remux them, you might notice the LG Web Player goes black and gives a memory error. You can workaround that in the following ways:
1) Go into the #--TRANSCODE--# folder on UMS, and select FFmpeg to force transcoding. That will strip the extra streams that may be causing the memory leak.
2) Remux your MKV files with MKVToolnix to remove all of the streams you won't use.

As soon as there is a new WebOS update we will test it and let you know the result.

[zdzichu160]

has the issue been fixed can we update now?

[SubJunk]

Yes, I think this is working well now, with the latest WebOS and UMS