I have a few players installed on Android TV devices (all Xiaomi Mi Box S) connected via optical to my stereo system. I don’t use 5.1, just stereo 2.0 configuration.
Android application does not have a feature to boost center channel (as OS X version does, for example). As a result, many movies are practically unwatchable, especially at night, when dialogs are mixed way below sound effects and I either wake up my neighbours or I can’t hear dialogs at all.
Is there any plan to add center channel boosting to Android TV apps? It seems like a very popular annoyance that makes a lot of people unhappy with their watching experience (I just googled people compaining about this not only on Plex, but generally across various watching platforms).
It’s an obvious shortcoming Plex is either unable or unwilling to do anything about.
Occasionally I run up against an item suffering from a poor downmix - the voices buried under sound effects. The ONLY way I have to deal with this, ATM, is to drag PMP to my TV so I can use the built-in Windows Normalization feature - or PMP’s onboard downmix fixer <---- that does work pretty good.
Could they do that on devices and their client apps?
Dunno, but they sure haven’t - after years of users screaming about it - so there might be some good reason why they can’t.
The only sensible reason I could think of “why” this is impossible to fix is that Android and other mobile-based OSes require the app to directly stream audio to the system and then the system deals with it. And maybe (just maybe) it’s Android TV that has to resolve this by adding center channel boost on downmix.
One evidence that would support that would be that Android 9 update that I got on one of my TVs contains compressor option that should allow to lower dynamic range of movies and make them more suitable for low volume watching. But that’s just a guess.
Yea, that sounds about right, but we’re out here looking in.
Plex has Users on a ‘Need to Know’ basis and we just don’t need to know apparently. That leaves us here in limbo waiting, wondering and speculating - when in 2 minutes of meaningful dialog we wouldn’t have to wonder wtf is going on… we’d know.
ATM, the PMP workaround is what I do when I can’t hear the dialog. It’s basically my only option - if I want to remain in the Plex ecosystem for playback of those troublesome items.
Well, I agree but at the same time being a product manager at work I can understand how some feature improvements which are indeed requested by a lot of users can get left on backburner for a long time because there are much more requested, much more pressing issues and developments. Still, would like to have this feature of course. Let’s see.
‘Swamp Thing 2019’ was so bad in this regard (HULU - go figure) Windows nor PMP could do much with it - but when I turned on the subtitles my brain thought the audio was better…lol
The issue is most likely caused by this:
The Plex app is relying on the OS (Android) to inform it correctly about the speaker configuration.
The OS is supposed to query the speaker configuration automatically from the attached device on the HDMI port.
If the device on the HMDI port is not answering or is giving a wrong answer, you’ll end up with the 5.1 speaker configuration being used.
In a 5.1 mix, all “dialog” audio is usually in the Center channel.
If you’re now playing a 5.1 audio track in your app, you will only get the ‘Left’ + ‘Right’ channels in your optical connection.
You need to find a way to tell the plex app that you are not using a 5.1 speaker configuration, but only stereo/2.0.
If your TV doesn’t have a setting to achieve that, you can “cheat” by inserting a device between the Android box and the TV, which is able to send a predetermined speaker configuration info.
