I tried it last night, and surprised something must have changed in the last firmware update for the Shield. It is just as described in the above link for the Apple TV. All the varieties of multi-channel flac only played 2 channel stereo. Plex showed direct play 5.1, but only the R & L played. It did not even downmix to stereo, much of the audio was missing.
So somewhere along the line they went from “it won’t play” to “it won’t play properly.” I’m less confident a Shield 2019 Pro would solve the problem either.
I will post a thread about this specifically in the Shield Forum. However, pending another outcome, this thread is back to it’s original intent: Advice on how to set up a HTPC to best work to run Plex. It still seems to be the the only platform I’m aware of that will actually play multi-channel audio only files. I’d love to find a streamer that does but for some inexplicable reason, none of the existing streamers do.
I run an HTPC with a GTX1050ti card, connected HDMI directly to my Sony 7.1 Receiver, and never had a problem Direct Playing absolutely everything I feed it using PMP.
I control it with a wireless media remote bought from Amazon.
It’s a 4th Gen Core i5, with 8GB of RAM, an SSD, boots straight to desktop and then automatically starts PMP.
It runs smooth as silk and would always recommend the HTPC route. However…
I haven’t yet got into 4K, and perhaps that will be a different story.
EDIT: I haven’t got any multi channel audio files, so cannot speak to that, but every other audio format has been fine.
This is sort of the middle of the road level PC hardware I was thinking about. I have not shopped hard by any stretch but just threw together a Ryzen 5 version of this with small form factor hardware and landed at $600 ish. A little more than I was hoping to spend on something that will essentially function as a streamer.
I guess the question is do I really need to go to a 1050 level card to get smooth video at 4K, or would the in chip video perform just fine. I’d spend the money if it made the difference but don’t want to do so unnecessarily. The additional benefit is I can use a smaller case if I don’t need the additional video.
To answer this, I’ll point you at what the graphics card state they can do:
So, assuming you want H.265 decoding of up to 4k@60Hz, the iGPU will suffice for a Skylake and later generation on the Intel side. If you need 10-bit decode, then you need Kaby Lake or above.
In reality, playback of video is a pretty simple task provided that the GPU has hardware acceleration of that decode.
