Playback Stopped After QSV & Transcode Tweaks – Fresh Install Still Fails

absolute_nobody

Hi folks – I’m running into a frustrating issue with ErsatzTV that I can’t seem to solve, even after a clean reinstall.

I installed ErsatzTV (v25.6.0-docker-amd64) yesterday and successfully connected it to Plex on my Synology NAS. It was a super easy install - yea!! Everything initially worked: I created multiple test channels, assigned media from my Plex library, and successfully played video via the Plex Live TV & DVR tuner on multiple channels. However, playback did include buffering, which I wanted to resolve.

To improve performance, I began tweaking a number of settings in both ErsatzTV and Plex — primarily around the FFmpeg profile (enabling QSV) and transcoding options. At some point during this tuning process, playback stopped working entirely. Now, even though Plex still sees the channels and the correct media file, attempts to play content throw a 5XX error.

The movie shows up in the Plex Activity Dashboard, but the stream never starts.

To troubleshoot, I:

Verified the movie files play on demand within Plex
Confirmed the paths are correct
Refreshed Plex channels and restarted Docker containers
Ran media playback tests in ETV (returning error code 8)
Verified Plex has access to media directories
Deleted ersatztv.sqlite3 and plex-secrets.json to start fresh

After reinstalling ETV, the UI and settings reset to defaults as expected. Once I toggle QSV on in the FFmpeg profile, the Health Check passes — but playback still fails.

Here’s my current setup:

ErsatzTV version: 25.6.0-docker-amd64
NAS: Synology DS224+ with Intel Celeron J4125 (supports QSV)
Docker container for ETV with mounted volume for media
Plex (latest version), also running via Docker inside the same Project
Using QSV hardware acceleration
Only syncing a single test library at the moment
Playback troubleshooting results in failure even on the default FFmpeg profile

At this point, I’m at a loss. The system clearly worked at first — which makes me confident QSV and hardware acceleration are supported by the NAS — but something about my configuration changes seems to have broken playback completely.

Any ideas on what I can try next?

Thanks in advance for your help!!

absolute_nobody

I have solved the playback issue. I can’t say how the problem started but I can report how I fixed it.

My yaml compose had this:

- /volume1/data/media:/volume1/data/media:ro
I changed it to this:

- /volume1/data/media:/data/media:ro
I don’t remember touching the compose code but that was the error.

Now my playback is running with extremely minimum buffering but I’m experiencing sync drift of about 8 seconds. I’m going to tinker with that next and will start a new thread, if needed.

jason

There are known sync issues with QSV (on Windows and on Linux, e.g. https://github.com/ErsatzTV/ErsatzTV/issues/2071). Since you're on Linux, it is recommended to use VAAPI acceleration with Intel devices.

absolute_nobody

jason Thanks! I had not seen that note. Also, I think I may be running up against hardware limitations. My NAS isn't built for this but I'm loving playing with ETV. If you have any hardware recs, I would love to see them. I need to run one stream at 1080p.