I use opus for a lot of my music. I’m not sure when it started, but lately when I’m casting music encoded with opus to my Nest Hub Max via Plexamp, the music sounds a bit warbly. I can’t think of a better way to describe it.
I can resolve it by skipping to the previous or next song, then back to the song I want to listen to. However, that sometimes takes several attempts before the playback isn’t warbly.
I don’t know whether it’s related, but Tautulli always shows that opus music is being direct streamed in an mkv container. I thought that Google devices natively supported opus playback?
Lastly, if I play opus music via Plexamp on my Windows 10 computer, it direct plays and never sounds warbly.
I would edit the OP and add the Plexamp tag, then approach this as that sort of issue by gathering Plexamp logs after rebooting then demonstrating the issue.
It’s a broad topic to speculate without logs, but Elan has mentioned that distorted audio is almost always overdriving a volume setting that goes to 125% of normal or a corrupt Plexamp install.
You get Direct Play when:
The player supports decoding the video codec
The player supports decoding the audio codec
Those two streams are placed into a container the Player can open.
You get Direct Stream when:
The player supports decoding the video codec
The player supports decoding the audio codec
The player can’t open the container. So PMS puts (1) and (2) unchanged into a different container.
When you asked whether Direct Stream could cause this, yes a new container was used, and maybe it’s possible to create a corrupt mkv, but that seems unlikely. MKV containers have been around for decades. Let’s hope it’s not that
Thanks, @nibbles. I actually posted this question on the Plex sub-reddit. Elan responded and stated “if you’re casting to chromecast that is a totally different player and out of Plexamp’s hands.” I asked whether it would be worth posting here in the Chromecast category, and he said “could be, yeah.” So, here I am.
Okay that helps me understand Elan thinks your music left Plexamp okay and got modified in the cast-to-android system. I think he’s mentioned before how a Chromecast gives Plexamp other basic problems like being unable to play audio gapless. Maybe the Nest Hub is equally as rough to work with at this point.
What is all the hardware involved here? Might as well describe everything for the record down to versions and model numbers.
If you can gather logs for the Nest Hub, you might duplicate your topic on a Nest / Chromecast forum. For my audio playback, I use a headless rPi, but luckily there are dozens of other streaming endpoints available if you decide to bypass the Nest.
