- On an Android TV client Direct-Playing a Live TV stream, there is a fair bit of random dropouts of the AC3 audio stream. These are entire dropouts: the receiver simply does not detect a stream.
- This is especially commonplace for the first couple of minutes or so of streaming, but can happen later as well.
- Disabling bitstream output globally on the client (an NVIDIA Shield 2017) has the effect of the audio being out of sync for about the same amount of time instead of constant pockets of silence, but doesn’t actually fix the problem (besides being far too much of a compromise given that this makes surround sound or a real LFE channel out of the question, or would require me to switch this setting specifically each time I wanted to use Live TV in Plex). This seems to rule out the receiver as the cause of the problem here.
- This does not occur when direct playing such Live TV streams with other client applications, like emby and channels, using the same server-machine and network configuration for both the client and server. (To rule out any possible strange issues with e.g. my switches or anything like that, I ended up connecting the Shield via WiFi, just like the other clients were, instead of via Ethernet–so when I say they had the same network configuration, I mean it.)
- This also does not occur on iOS/tvOS, Android mobile, or Roku.
- Given all this, my assumption is that there is maybe something in the NVIDIA or Android TV network stack that throws Plex’s ExoPlayer for a loop, but which other vendors have managed to mitigate successfully.
- Upgrading to the latest version of the app did not help. Neither did closing and reopening the app, and neither did rebooting the client or restarting the PMS application.
- If there is some Android TV setting that could be the culprit of this, I’d like to hear about it.
- If it is possible to fix this by forcing Direct Stream for MPEG2+AC3 ts streams for this device (in other words to force a remux without any transcoding) I’d like to hear about how to do that.
- If it is possible to fix this by transcoding the audio only, and to do this without being limited to 2.0 channels, I’d like to hear about how to do that as well.
- Otherwise: this is primarily a bug report, not a request for support, hacky workarounds, or other dubious suggestions. I’m especially not interested in switching to just straight transcoding, which is a waste on a local wired network and not really acceptable for interlaced content since it is deinterlaced to half-rate (which looks especially bad for sports, but just janky in general). Thanks in advance.
Client version: 8.28.0.29826
Server version: 1.25.2.5319
