Best Client (Player)

General Discussions
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Hello Everybody,

First I’d like to excuse myself if this thread is in the wrong sub theme.

I build myself a FreeNAS Server with a Plex Media Server running as a Jail and now I want to buy a good client for it.
On the server there are many 1080p movies (35gigs because I don’t want them to be compressed) and later I also want to store 4k movies (probably 50gigs).

Because of that the Apple TV 4k and the Nvidia Shield are in the shortlist but I have a few things to compare before I buy and thats the point where I hope you can help me…

First is the Apple TV 4k even able to play mkv files via streaming from the Plex Server? I own an iPhone which is able to play them but what about the Apple TV?
And is the Apple TV able to play the audio ?
I often hear about passthrough but I’m not quite sure what it does to be honest…

On the other side, what about the Nvidia Shield?
Is it able to play the things I just listet ?

And the last question, maybe somebody knows…
After the WWDC of Apple this month they announced Dolby Atoms for Apple TV.
What is more likely to come first - DTS:X for Apple or Dolby Atoms for Nvidia Shield.
I’m aware that you can’t predict the future but maybe some of you have heard some infos of Apple or Nvidia so I thought I just ask this question.

Or maybe you can name a player which is even better than both of them (but I think I read that these are currently the best)

Thank you for you time

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The Apple TV 4K is probably the best Plex client available. The UI of the official Plex app is great & anything that won’t play can be handle at minimal cost by purchasing MrMC or Infuse as alternative clients.

The Amazon Fire TV is a cheaper alternative but the official Plex app UI is dire since they dumbed it down to the standard Android TV UI. However MrMC is a good replacent & plays most anything.

The Nvidia Shield plays everything but also has the ghastly Android TV UI but again MrMC can replace it.

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Passthrough audio is when the client passes the audio stream unaltered to your TV, receiver, etc. If you play a movie with an audio stream that is not supported by your system, the client will transcode the audio to one that is supported.

If you are using the built in TV speakers then you probably won’t notice any difference. However, if you’ve a decent surround setup and you’re playing a movie w/ surround audio, you’ll definitely notice it when the audio is transcoded.

The ability to passthrough audio depends on the capabilities of the client hardware and OS, not just the Plex app.

For example, Amazon Fire TVs do not support passthrough for dts audio. This is a limitation of the device, not of the Plex client.

If you play a movie with a dts audio track using a Fire TV device, the audio will be transcoded to PCM 5.1 or PCM 2.0 depending on the capabilities of your receiver or TV.

The Shield TV, however, happily passes dts unaltered to the attached device. If the attached receiver or TV does not support dts, the Shield will then transcode it to a supported format.

Regarding “best client” discussion:

I don’t have a Plex capable Apple TV, so can’t compare it to other Plex clients.

I do have a Nvidia Shield and an Amazon Fire TV Gen 2 box. The Shield is definitely a better device for use as a Plex client (which it should be given the price points of the devices).

The Shield has supported Dolby Atmos and dts:X for quite some time. It bitstreams both formats to my Denon AVR w/o issue. Same for TrueHD, dts-HD MA, and every other Dolby & dts codec. The Fire TVs do not support dts audio. Any dts stream will be transcoded. Current Fire TVs also support Atmos. Mine is older and does not, so can’t tell you how well Atmos works on a Fire TV.

The Shield direct plays everything I throw at it. It has no problem playing rips of DVDs, Blu-rays @ 1080p, and Blu-rays @ 4K (SDR & HDR).

The Shield does not support Dolby Vision. It is HDR10 only. Unknown if it can or will support DV. Like Plex, Nvidia does not release product plans.

Like the Shield, the Fire TV Gen 3 (pendant) and Fire TV Cube devices support HDR10 video, and do not support Dolby Vision. Some earlier model Fire TVs support 4K, but do not support HDR.

You can also use the Shield as a Plex server. It can handle several 1080p transcodes (not sure about 4K). Having a second PMS can be handy. You can use it to share the load if you start serving many remote clients which may require transcoding, test new PMS releases, etc.

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@FordGuy61 said:
For example, Amazon Fire TVs do not support passthrough for dts audio. This is a limitation of the device, not of the Plex client.

If you play a movie with a dts audio track using a Fire TV device, the audio will be transcoded to PCM 5.1 or PCM 2.0 depending on the capabilities of your receiver or TV.

This is incorrect. If you use Kodi on Amazon Fire TV you can enable audio passthrough so DTS is passed through unchanged to your AV receiver. MrMC is the cleaned up version of Kodi without the naughty addons & has Plex client support. The one add-on it supports is Plex for Kodi.

Bottom line is that if you use MrMC as your Plex client on the Amazon Fire TV then not only do you have a much nice Plex UI but you also get audio passthrough thus support for DTS with no transcoding.

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