Hi folks, I’m using the Plex app on tvOS 15.0 and with AirPods Max, when Spatial Audio is enabled, I get 5.1 sound on movies with DTS, TrueHD, AC-3 etc. I’ve been waiting for this forever (no home cinema speakers for me) and I love the experience.
It only works when ‘use old video player’ is enabled in Plex though. Does this mean I’m going to lose the feature when the ‘old player’ is dropped? Or is surround via Spatial Audio heading for the new player too?
Thanks for any advice!
Support in the new player would awesome!
Yes same issue … but the “old” video player chokes on some feeds. The “new” one works well. Need to have spatial audio working with “new” video player on Apple TV 4k.
Running TVOS 15.1.1 and checking with Air Pods gen 3, Pro and Max. Works great with Netflix, Disney, YouTube, YouTube TV, Amazon Video…but not PLEX with “new” video. The PLEX app on Apple TV 4k works much better than NVIDIA Shield and ROKU implementation but needs to be fixed to allow spatial audio with new video turned on.
Best that can be offered in the meantime is Infuse. I think it’s £1 a month or about £8 a year.
Spatial Audio works beautifully.
It’s a good call @Xhaka; I’ve had a lot of success with Infuse Pro’s audio and the player is very good. It’s difficult to compare the player directly with the Plex client (probably because they’re quite similar), but Infuse maintains the integrity of the Plex backend (metadata etc.) and the lack of friction with audio makes it a better experience for now.
The only downside I’ve found (and if I’m wrong, please shout!) is that Infuse has to connect to the Plex backend as the main user, so there’s no support for Plex Home users, which I’ve exploited to implement library and parental restrictions. It’s only a mild irritant though as I’m the only one with the high-end AirPods so they don’t ‘need’ Infuse.
I imagine there’s a Plex update in the works, they’re not going to lose the AppleTV crowd over poorly implemented Spatial Audio.
Yeah sadly as far as I’m aware that’s exactly the case. You can’t switch accounts as yet.
As a disclaimer I will add that Infuse ticks a lot of boxes for me. Trakt, Video scrubbing thumbs on the fly… BUT for tv shows I find navigation a really painful experience in Infuse. So I still use Plex directly often. Plus occasionally I do watch media while I’m out of my network, so as Infuse is purely a direct play client it’s never gonna be a full time replacement for me.
For movies though the experience in Infuse compared to Plex is night and day and not just with regards to spatial audio.
It would be great to just have a single client that does everything…sadly we are a long way from that.
I would also be interested why spacial audio is not availabe on the new player.
Well to be fair it only partially works with the old player depending on codecs.
I’m in the same boat. Just bought Airpods Max and using it with Apple TV 4k. I normally use and like Plex client for all viewing, but had to install Infuse until Plex steps up and provide the update.
The things missing in Infuse is especially profiles as mentioned, but also rating they take RT reviewers rating. Plex have both.
What will I miss if using old player. It transcoded video, but will I loose quality then?
I really hope they soon add missing spatial audio in Plex soon.
From what I recall it simply muxed mkv to mp4.
There wasn’t actually a quality loss.
The main advantage (again only from recollection)
is that the new player handles embedded subtitles like PGS directly and happily plays a 4K remux with embedded subs in direct play.
(Other than HD-Audio which it converts to lossless FLAC.)
@DaveBinM can hopefully confirm this, or at least some of it.
As a side note Plex are working on Dolby Vision profile 5 in an mkv file. This will apparently actually trigger the old player to do this regardless of whether you use the new or old player as default.
So my assumption from that is that old player won’t be going anywhere soon if a newer feature is reliant on it.
Sadly though there has been no word on spatial audio officially so for now Infuse will have to coexist on my ATV 4K.
From memory AVPlayer (the old player) only really supports h264, h265, AC3, EAC3, and I think srt subs. Anything else will require transcoding and/or burn-in. The new player (mpv) supports many more codecs and formats, including image based subs, additional video codecs (MPEG2VIDEO, VC-1, etc.), and more audio codecs (FLAC, opus, dts/dca), alongside additional containers like mkv. However, I don’t have anything else I can add about spatial audio at this point in time.
Any news on Spatial Audio support with Plex?
Please!!! The old video player forces transcoding on 99% of my files, but its the only way to get spatial audio to work on iPhone and appleTV. With new video player plex shows as stereo
Please add spatial audio infuse does it fine
Any news on this?
I can’t believe this has not been addressed yet. Can anyone form the Plex team provide some context as to why this has not been addressed?
Any news on this?
Just to confirm, tested this on Plex (8.1.1) on AppleTV 4K (tvOS 15.4.1) today, still no multi-channel audio in the current video player.
FYI it’s the same on iPad Pro #3 (iPadOS 15.4.1), multi-channel audio is only available from Plex (8.1.1) when Use Old Video Player is enabled.
I like spatial audio and got tired of waiting. Just got infuse and appears to be working like a charm.
Plex developers, please take note.
Spatial audio is a big enough feature that you may lose subscribers.
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