Cannot direct play 4K media with 7.1 audio

Plex Players Smart TVs
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Server Version#: 1.24.4.5081
Playing on my 2019 Samsung Q60R.

I cannot direct play 4K media that has 7.1 TrueHD audio for some reason.

If my 4K video has a second audio option i can flip to that and it will transcode just the audio and leave the video, but if it has 7.1 TrueHD audio then it transcodes both the audio and video.

Is this a bug? is there a workaround for this?

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

1 Like
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Hey Plex Devs are you going to address the issues that you create in your releases or. are you going to ignore posts like this one?

102 views and no Dev has replied, giving that this is clearly a bug you’ve introduced in your releases.

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Any news on this issue?

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Hi @dantebarba…

You may be hitting a few limitations here, but also you have not told us if you are playing the audio straight out of the TV, or via an AVR or Soundbar.

Firstly, if you are using the internal Plex app on the TV itself, then it will not pass through TrueHD audio to any AVR / Soundbar via HDMI.

There is currently no TV on the market that supports passthrough of HD audio codecs from internal apps over HDMI. This includes Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA.

Also, if you have connected your TV to your network via Ethernet (hard wired), then the Network port on the TV will be limited to 100Mbps, and many / most 4K rips will have peaks over 100Mbps.

Again, there are currently no TV’s on the market that have gigabit LAN ports, although I am not 100% sure about the very latest 8K models.

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In my case the issue has been solved: just to clarify

  • My issue was not present before, a new Plex client has indeed broken something that I couldn’t Direct Stream.
  • I was wrong about the TrueHD codec. The issue happened whenever Plex had to Direct Stream instead of Direct Play.
  • Solution: my plex server is running under a reverse proxy. I’ve never had any issues direct streaming using my reverse proxy (traefik) but there was some kind of Plex client update that has generated this. To solve the issue I had to expose port 32400 and let plex stream directly through TCP bypassing my reverse proxy.
  • I don’t like this solution as I’m exposing port 32400 letting plex available for possible attacks, but it’s the only way I’ve found that Direct Stream started working again. Probably some modification on how plex sends the transcoded chunks has generated this.

More info:

1 Like
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I still currently haven’t found a reliable fix for this.
it’s kinda 50/50 as to whether or not my TV will direct stream the 4k Media.

I’ve settled on using Plex optimized versions and just optimizing it with original quality.
Sometimes this allows me to direct play, other times its less CPU intensive for my server to transcode it down.

I’d be happy to try other things and see if I can get something to work, but at this point I feel like I’ve tried most things and nothing is working reliably.

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