Hi
I’ve been editing the client profile for my CX. Initially this was due to the default behaviour transcoding to MP3 for a period of time, however this looks like it has now been fixed and now works like it used to do, which is to transcode to aac when possible or to eac3 when looking at tracks with more than 6 channels.
There are still flaws to this. Firstly for normal 5.1 surround sound, PLEX will transcode to 5.1 aac even though the though the tv doesn’t officially support this and will convert it to stereo. For this reason I’ve edited the client profile to limit aac to 2 channel and use ac3 and eac3 for 5.1 and higher formats.
What I want to do is have PLEX transcode to FLAC for stereo audio when possible. this is because lossless audio conversion is always the best quality especially if the source is already a lossy codec. To do this you need to edit your client profile to use MKV container for the transcode target instead of the default mpegts
from this:
<TranscodeTargets>
<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mpegts" videoCodec="h264" audioCodec="aac,ac3,eac3" context="streaming">
<Setting name="BreakNonKeyframes" value="true" />
</VideoProfile>
</TranscodeTargets>
to this:
<TranscodeTargets>
<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mkv" videoCodec="h264" audioCodec="flac,ac3,eac3" context="streaming">
<Setting name="BreakNonKeyframes" value="true" />
</VideoProfile>
</TranscodeTargets>
This will work and playback video with FLAC audio, however the act of using the mkv container means that plex for some reason won’t let you seek forward more than 40 odd seconds when first playing back a video (with or without FLAC audio). If you are already half way through a video and seek backwards and then skip to where you were then this will work. Just initially it looks like you have to skip in 30-40 second increments when you first load up the video. Also annoying if the app ever crash or you need to take a break and need to leave something half watched to come back later to.
To add to this, since FLAC isn’t supported generally in mpegts, this means that if you try and transcode to FLAC with this container you will get silent audio.
I believe that this bug is easily reproducible but let me know if you want to send over my full edits to the client profile for testing. In any case the default transcode behaviour can be improved and I hope plex can fix this.
Maybe @ChuckPa can verify this behaviour using his LG C1.
Server Version#: 1.41.8.9834
Client version: 5.93.2, Platform version: 5.6.1
