I’m hoping someone has someone from Plex can provide an update on the longstanding high bitrate audio dropout issue. I’ve just been testing many of the titles in my collection that have these audio tracks and the issue still exists.
Specifically, this occurs for TrueHD tracks with 96kHz or 192KHz bitrates. Also, your Plex player must be set to passthrough or else Plex will transcode the title to Opus audio. As is often the case, playing the same track in the old Kodi Plex player doesn’t result in these dropout issues.
Some of the Blu-ray titles I’ve experienced this issue with are:
My Fair lady (1956) - Dolby TrueHD 7.1 (96kHz)
Akira (1988) - Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (192kHz)
The Right Stuff (1983) - Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (96kHz)
The Police: Certifiable (2008) - Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (96kHz)
Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds: Live at Radio City - (2007) - Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (96khz)
Here’s a search from BR.com if you want to find other titles to test:
DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1/7.1 96khz and 192kHz do not exhibit audio dropouts on any of my AVR or soundbars.
Dolby TrueHD 5.1/7.1 96kHz & 192kHz does exhibit audio dropouts on my Nakamichi Sound Bar, low end Denon AVRs and Onkyo AVR. However on my flagship model Denon AVRs it does not. I can only conclude that the higher end AVRs have more error tolerant audio decoders.
Agreed, I’m only seeing this on 96/192 kHz TrueHD tracks.
That’s interesting regarding your higher end AVR and I also suspect it’s error handling is more tolerant. For what it’s worth, I’m using a mid-tier Denon AVR-X3200W.
Again, I only see this with the native Plex client on my Shield. The Kodi plex client on the same Shield device plays it flawlessly.
Kodi has its own audio passthrough implementation labeled Kodi IEC packer. Plex and Emby employ Exoplayer which relies on the Android IEC packer. If you configure Kodi to use the Android IEC packer, it will suffer the same issue.
The higher end AVR thing would only make sense if it had the same issue when you played the Blu-ray/4K UHD in a player and have the same problem. The ones I have play fine in a player but when ripped the Shield had an issue through the Plex native app.
No not necessarily. Playing a BD/4K BD disc in a STB player has never exhibited the issue. The root cause is with the different IEC packer implementations. Kodi has solved the issues with their IEC packer development thus it is likely not malforming/truncating the MAT encapsulation packets. The Android IEC packer is not properly packing the MAT encapsulation packets, which is manifesting as audio dropouts. The higher end AVRs do not have the same decoders as the lower end AVRs. The deduction here is they could be better at dealing with malformed MAT encapsulation packets.
So, I got a chance to test both My Fair Lady (Blu-ray and UHD) and Akira (Blu-ray).
MFL uses a 96 kHz audio track, with the Blu-ray having an even higher bit rate than the UHD. My Shield was unable to play either one without major audio dropouts. Akira played just fine with both the English 96 kHz and the Japanese 192 kHz tracks. This is odd, because the 192 kHz track has a much higher bit rate than the MFL track. The difference between the two is that MFL is TrueHD 7.1 while Akira is TrueHD 2.0/5.1 respectively.
It almost looks like a regression with the Plex client once again, because I was able to play MFL without any dropouts just a couple of months ago with 9.1.0.31720-beta.
My gear: LG C7, Denon AVR-X3500H, 2019 Shield TV Pro, latest fw/sw on all
