Apple TV 4K converting all audio to AC3?

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Hello!

I don’t know if this has always been a thing, but haven’t used Plex in a while and came back to the Apple TV 4K app and I’m noticing under the playback settings that all my audio tracks get re-encoded to AC3 (unless they are already AC3/EAC3 which seem to get direct-played). Is this normal? Was this always the case? I feel like it used to be that Plex decoded everything (even DTS-HD/Dolby TrueHD) to PCM and the Apple TV would then output that. Or is this a limitation if you’re not a Plex Pass subscriber? Do I need to subscribe to the Plex Pass to get full audio output options? How does it all work? The Plex audio help on the website don’t really seem to indicate anything in particular one way or the other.

I’ve also noticed that some episodes that are DTS sound a little weird when converted this way. For example, the volume in Plex on some episodes of Community are much lower (mainly the center channel) than in, say, Infuse for example (which direct plays all/most audio tracks).

Thank you for the help!

2

I don’t believe this was ever the case. The Infuse app however, which talks to the Plex server, does this.

3

Indeed? Perhaps this was never the case and I’m just confused because I didn’t see what it was doing behind the scenes. I was just surprised to see it, because I had always assumed it would decode everything directly to PCM (as that is what the Apple TV 4K outputs for everything in auto mode).

Is the same true for the enhanced player if one pays for the Plex Pass? Does that also decode to AC3 for everything?

4

Nope. Flac 7.1

1 Like
5

Oh. Wait. FLAC? So it goes (for example) DTS-HD -> FLAC 7.1 -> PCM 7.1?

6

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