5.1 Audio in Chrome is Very Quiet and/or Stereo

Plex Players Desktop Players
1

Server Version#: 1.41.9.9961
Player Version#: 4.147.1

When playing 5.1 audio content through the Plex web player, it becomes very quiet and muddled, I can barely crank my audio up high enough to barely hear it. Any other sound on my system blows my speakers out. Also fighting scenes are normally extremely loud, while talking scenes are like a whisper…

If I directly open the video through VLC, or even with Chrome (proving that Chrome is capable of playing it just fine) it plays most of the audio out of the center channel nice and clearly.

I verified that Chrome was able to handle 5.1 audio just fine via:

All of the files there played just fine.
PS: I went down a rabbit hole thinking I needed to enable 5.1 for Chrome, but it’s baked in just fine now.

My Plex Dash shows this

Screenshot_20250722-211900
Screenshot_20250722-2119001079×263 123 KB

I have tried

  • Disabling the multi channel leveling option for the web player
  • Alternate Chromium based streaming options for the web player (just got a black screen and the same audio)

Questions

  • Why is it transcoding if it seems that Chrome is plenty capable of playing the file?
  • Why is the audio so quiet?
  • Is it just dropping the center channel which has most of the audio?
  • Is it transcoding down to stereo and throwing away the center channel?

Additional Notes

  • It works as expected in the desktop app just fine. There’s no RTX super resolution here though.

I’m trying to use the web player because I can utilize RTX Super Sampling (I don’t get this with the Plex desktop player). I can use the VLC RTX edition player, but then I miss out on Plex and watch history.

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