Hi, I have a Philips Smart TV with Android TV from where I have Plex installed. I’m using the TVs Optical SPDIF/Toslink to connect to my 5.1 sound system. The TV has the Dolby Multi Stream Decoder (MS12 chip) which seems to be present in most of the Philips Smart TV lineup from the past few years (I assume other vendors might also have it). That decoder seems to support pretty much all Dolby format (Including ATMOS) and is able to automatically transcode those signals to a Optical SPDIF/Toslink compatible 5.1 output. This seems to be working perfectly fine in the Native Video player, the Netflix and Amazon Prime apps (The ones I tested at least). For those apps TrueHD, EAC3 and even object based Dolby Atmos gets transcoded to a 5.1 bitstream that works with the optical output.
I was just wondering why can’t Plex let the TV handle the audio bitstream? Plex seems to require a explicit setup for the audio output of the bitstream. Setting the bitstream output to “Optical” in Plex allows to use the Optical output on the TV, but requires Plex to transcode the audio to AC3 for all modern audio formats. Using the “HDMI” or “None” output option still yields a AC3 encoded bitstream coming to my audio receiver, but for some reason it’s in Stereo.
Is there some specific reason why Plex is unable to just forward the audio bitstream to the TV to let the TV handle the audio processing? How is Netflix and the other streaming apps doing it? Or are these features hidden behind vendor locked functionality on the Android Smart TVs?
It would be great to get some technical insights why these limitations are present in Plex, what functionality is being used by the other streaming services to make this work and ultimately if there is any chance for it to ever get fixed in Plex.
Info on the Dolby Multi Stream Decoder: Dolby Multistream Decoder MS12 - Dolby Professional
Server Version#: 1.26.0.5715
Player Version#: 9.0.6.31998
