The simple truth is that this sort of thing is the result of Linux's distributed and modular development culture, not just PS3mediaserver. The philosophy of letting different components do one thing well, and development by multiple and (often) uncoordinated teams means breakages and regressions. My playback issues were being caused by libav, a fork of ffmpeg, because PMS couldn't find "ffmpeg" in that environment. And because my solution for the audio (which is still working very well for me) doesn't identify what component is being used to transcode the audio, it's a bit of a cipher. If it breaks, I won't know what to do either, and I'll end up using Plex as well. Still, I prefer how PMS handles audio files (when it works), and I like my audiobooks, so there's that. Weirdly, this issue never effected my pure audio files, only video files. That may explain the difference in our experiences.