I started as a Plex customer due to Plexamp, but now I’m also trying to use it to serve 4K movies from my collection (ripped with MakeMKV). I have an Apple TV, latest generation with Ethernet. The experience so far has been shockingly bad.
After noticing that playback was transcoded (despite settings for native/direct playback) and the Apple TV wasn’t passing the raw video nor audio streams to my AVR, I started reading up on what was going on… why didn’t Plex on Apple TV “just work” ?
And I came to the conclusion that apparently Plex on Apple TV can’t actually play movies properly? This seemed to be blamed on “limitations of TvOS”, yet there’s a 3rd party app called Infuse that can do it just fine? And even the new beta version of Plex for Apple TV doesn’t fix this issue?
Is this correct? Like, really?
So now, from what I gather, I have two options if I want to play my 4K rips via Plex and have everything work as it should:
Pay $99 for a lifetime license of Infuse
Pay $200 for an Nvidia Shield Pro
In case #1, I’m left wondering why Plex doesn’t do what Infuse does? Why not fix the Plex app so it streams 4K content to Apple TV without transcoding the video and screwing up the surround sound? I realize Apple could be the one to make this easier, but if Infuse has gotten around the API limitations, then Plex can too, no? Why should I have to pay another company to have a baseline acceptable experience watching 4K rips via Plex on my Apple TV?
Of course, I’m hoping I’m wrong. But I’ve spent hours researching this and it really does seem that all of the above is true, despite how completely ridiculous it sounds.
What codecs are you using and what’s transcoding? That’ll help folks better advise.
In general, most people that want good 4k Bluray rip playback on AppleTV do tend to go with Infuse. You can set it up to connect to your Plex and use it as frontend client. Infuse paid for more codec licensing which allows them to handle playback a little more completely than Plex (that’s part of what you’re paying for with them).
AppleTV client fell way behind in development a few years back because Plex didn’t have enough staff for it - essentially. Once they did staff up they started a beta to improve the experience and playback which folks seemed to be pretty positive about but then New Experience came along and kinda muddled it again.
Essentially BluRay native content won’t direct play and needs to be converted to a streaming friendly format. Other than Shield that’s pretty much the case on all the streaming devices.
So Profile 7 for HDR (and some variations) and TrueHD\DTS-MA is typically not supported and\or will have to transcode. Plex doesn’t support DolbyVision decoding - they didn’t pay for the license - so they can’t transcode\tone map DV; they can passthrough DV if supported by the client or if HDR is available as fallback (like with Profile 8) they can drop down to that and tonemap it that way. AppleTV supports DV\HDR\HDR10: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102339 so you should be fine but if you’re using Profile 7 that can throw that off.
I mostly use Roku but have been watching AppleTV development for quite some time because I tried a Shield and it didn’t play well with my system and AppleTV tends to be recommended as the “best” option outside of Shield. So far my Roku has been pretty solid though - just kinda clunky (and no ads if you setup a good dns adblocker). One of the more experienced AppleTV folks can give ya’ more specifics - particularly around the New Experience client playback support.
I checked a few other films and they play fine. Must have been bad luck. The first one I tried was INXS: Live Baby Live. For some reason it was showing up as “Transcoded” when using the TrueHD 7.1 audio track. I switched to the DTS 5.1 audio track and the video shows as “Direct Play”, BUT it still stutters heavily on playback. The only difference I see compared to other films that play fine, is that this one ended up encoded at 60 fps. Maybe that’s the issue. I’ll reencode it at 30 fps and see if that fixes it.
A few questions:
Does Plex for Apple TV pass the video without touching it? I assume if it says “Direct Play” it’s passing all the original video data through the HDMI without stripping anything from it?
And does Plex for Apple TV only have issues with TrueHD? It seems to convert this to FLAC. Is this multichannel FLAC? Does it only lose the height metadata?
Does Plex for Apple TV not touch DTS audio streams?
Sorry for all the questions. It’s a bit difficult to figure out what’s really going on here. I don’t see these same issues with playback via Plex on my PC, Macbook, or iPad.
The public Plex app is over a year old and is abandoned. Sometime soon a new one will come out.
AppleTV HW can output all the video, 4k/60hz/HDR/DV/HDR10+ even 4:4:4. It’s upto the app to decode it.
AppleTV Hw can output all the audio. Outputs lossless 24bit/48khz LPCM perfectly compatible with every AVR I’ve used. AVR needs LPCM in order to apply room correction. ATV even does Dolby MAT for even more formats like Atmos. Again, app developers have to decode and use Apple’s API.
Plex app hasn’t built in the decoding. Infuse has built in the decoding.
Plex is very good for my parents, my sister that just have a TV and TV speakers, they are happy, it just works.
If you have an AVR, you’ll want Infuse. If you have enthusiast taste, you may need enthusiast tools and apps.
Quick google shows this was 1080i, which is interlaced for CRT. Will need to be transcoded to progressive for modern digital screens. IT has to be transcoded somewhere, server or app. In this case it sounds like plex has chosen to do on server.
I use MyChannels or something like that for my HDHomeRun tuner, it does the transcoding within its app.
Plex app just doesn’t embed a lot of codec support.
I made this for some family, it might help, its not perfect, don’t crucify me. I need to find more time with the google streamer, old college buddy really liking it, but I can’t easily put through paces from remote:
Looks like those fiddle with the client profile to make Plex think AV1 can be played on the AppleTV - which it seems it can on modern models so I’m not sure why Plex hasn’t enabled this natively.
It should be transcoding these to PCM\LPCM I believe but for DTS it’s likely transparent in that case; essentially the same, just different format.
All good. Client support for Plex depends on the client itself so capabilities are different depending on the client. Plex supports “native” playback and if the client can’t play the codec natively it’ll transcode it at the server side. The server decides what\how that goes based on information it pulls from the client about its capabilities - that’s the profile thing that script for AV1 on Apple will touch.
So, for example, anime with SSA subs plays natively on my iPad but on my Roku the Plex server will transcode to burn-in those subtitles for me. My server can handle that just fine so it’s doing its job to make the experience seamless. With audio, most of the time the transcoding is mostly transparent as well unless you have a nicer audio setup in which case you might miss out on that Atmos experience but most folks can’t tell the difference (and won’t if they don’t have a 7.1.4 AV setup in the first place).
So my advice is to not worry about transcoding situations too much and focus on the experience. Menel has lots of good points if you do have an enthusiasts AV setup.
This chart is very helpful (as is the info from everyone else so far).
Looks like even with the new beta Plex app, Infuse still offers more functionality…
I tripled checked all the settings on Apple TV, the display screen, and the AVR and I can’t find any reason why INXS is stuttering heavily in Plex but not Infuse. The original format is 59.94 fps. Is 4K at 59.94 fps just too much for Plex to handle? And Infuse is a more efficient app?
It’s a more capable app. It has more codec licenses so it can be more flexible about decode\encode situations.
The general statement I usually see about Infuse vs Plex on AppleTV is that Plex is a nicer and snappier interface to navigate while Infuse does better playback. The Plex connector with Infuse is kinduva hybrid of the two. I’m not sure how that opinion may have changed with the New Experience UI on TVOS.
If you do decide to get a new streaming device, go with the Ugoos AMB6+. With a bit of work, you’ll have a device that can play all of your 4K rips (FEL included). It also supports full passthrough audio.
Look, audio and video is a minefield of complexity. If there are a dozen different audio variables, a dozen different video variables, a dozen different file package variables, that is dozen cubed, ^3, over 1700.
Then you bring in platform variables and their handling of these variables, apple vs android vs webos vs tizen vs roku… more. Plex has to handle all of these OS’s. Plex is spread incredibly thin.
If you consider yourself video enthusiast and your sole platform is an Apple TV 4K, then your best option is to invest in Infuse Pro at the moment. They do only one thing: Media playback on the Apple ecosystem. It’s all they do; there’s no Windows, no Linux, no Android, no Roku, no random TV OS, nothing else. They do only Apple, and they do it extremely well.
If you’re slightly less of an enthusiast, then it might be worth waiting for the new experience app to be generally released. The interface does require an adjustment period. But I find it generally pleasing and well laid out (others don’t and have expressed their options vociferously elsewhere on these forums).
The new experience app still has issues with DV Profile 5 (if it can’t direct play it, it can’t play it at all). That will likely be corrected at some point (direct play of DV Profile 5). What you’ll likely never get is Dolby Atmos in a TrueHD codec. The best Plex will ever get you there is an LPCM transcode with lossless audio, but none of the Atmos metadata.
My primary point is that Plex is still a great media server, in general. There’ve been some new features added recently which are pretty exciting. But the client experience is likely never going to compete with bespoke, highly-specialized clients such as Infuse.
