Audio Passthrough not working correctly with nvidia shield app

Plex Players Streaming Devices
1

Good morning plex community

So I normally use the Plex Kodi Addon with my Nvidia Shield as it can direct play “ASS” subtitles and the passthrough works best. Passthrough works perfectly and the reciever always shows the right format. Now I’ve had several problems with the addon and I’ve seen that its no longer maintained. So I want to use the normal plex app but audio Passthrough doesnt seem to work. I’ve enabled it in the settings (HDMI as its connect mted via hdmi)
When I start a stream my reciever only shows “mutli ch” and not the wanted audio format as for example dolby dts. Is this wanted or does passthrough just not work correctly?

Thanks for any help!

2

I’m also having the same issue and have done for some time now and mainly when trying to play 4K content. Yet when playing 4K on Emby and Netflix etc all is working fine.

3

Its such a shame. With a good audio system you cant watch without passthrough, it destroys the viewing experience. Also the kodi addon isnt maintained anymore and full of other bugs. I dont want to quit plex… just such a shame

4

you can certainly use shield with pass through.

it must be enabled in both shield settings and in plex player settings.

dts/truehd/atmos all work through plex as long as you have a compatible hdmi cable and receiver.

5

Well same setup and with kodi it works. So I dont know what I dont make right. Will check again this evening

6

well neither of you provided much details, or screenshots of the pms dashboard, or logs.

while not perfect, shield is pretty much the only streaming device with hd audio pass through, your experience sounds like configuration incorrect.

7

[Album] for plex

I made pictures to explain it. Same file with kodi and with plex

8

@TeknoJunky

can you explain this?

9

That screenshot tells me nothing?

10

You can literally see that the Audio gets decoded by the shield tv and not passthrough to the reciever. Kodi does it perfectly right

11

kodi has nothing to do with plex.

if the shield is decoding and not passing through, then you have either the shield or plex configured incorrectly.

12

Shield Settings seem to fine as Kodi on the same machine is capable of it. On the Plex app there is only one setting to change and I did change it. I am also not the only one with this problem. In the end it doesnt matter that much as the shield can direct play most of my audio without passthrough. Still it does not seem to be my fault here or I am missing something

13

kodi has it’s own decoding/passthrough path. again what kodi can do and what plex can do are completely irrelevant to each other.

please go through every shield system setting, make sure passthrough is on/auto.

14

see @ DTS-HD, TrueHD, ATMOS, showing as Multi-channel on AVR

15

Yeah I have these Settings. But a user in the thread had the same issue with pcm. So I will try to change them a bit, cant hurt.

Thanks for trying to help me :metal:

16

some other suggestions;

  • try a different hdmi cable
  • unplug all equipment including AVR (full power removal) and cold restart
  • check for any AVR firmware updates

assuming non-broken, correctly configured shield/plex and suitable hdmi/avr, pass through is definitely supposed to work, and does for most people.

17

Yeah will try that. The HDMI cable is high quality tho.

Also is the handling of passthrough really that different (kodi vs plex) that the HDMI could be the problem with plex but not with kodi ? Will swap it anyway tho.

At least I havent seen any transcoding yet. And also the PCM Signal that gets passed to my reciever with plex shouldnt get me any quality loss I’ve read

18

kodi is a self contained app that has all its own codecs and direct access to hardware.

plex is a generally lightweight app that relies the shield/android api’s and capabilities.

if you still can’t get it to work, to do anything more than the guessing around…

make sure debug ON, verbose OFF
Plex Web > settings >
image

play a video that isn’t working for you

  • screenshot of plex server dashboard > Plex Web > settings > dashboard
  • logs > Plex Web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs > drag/drop into a reply here
19

Good news

After I tried some things and it didnt work I decided to factory reset my shield and do all over again, and now it works!
It may be that I missed something in the first place but more importanly it seems to work now. Thanks a ton mister

1 Like
20

awesome! glad you got sorted, sorry you had such a difficult time getting it to work.

enjoy your shield!

1 Like