I have just a handful (9) of movies I’ve ripped from my 4k BluRay discs. I noticed one video (John Wick) has issues with playback on my Nvidia Shield. Both audio and video are occasionally choppy. All other movies play back just fine on the same device (2017 Nvidia Shield TV).
As far as I can tell, the settings on both John Wick and many other movies are virtually the same (e.g. HEVC format, 4k, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, 10 bits bit depth, HDR10, YUV color space, BT.2020 Color primaries). The ONLY difference I can find is that the audio is Dolby Digital TrueHD (rather than DTS-MA)
You have hit the nail on the head. More often than not it is the audio. Look and see if it is transcoding it or direct streaming it. True HD, Atmos etc. All make things super angry. If its transcoding it has issues. I believe the shield can actually do passthru with plex unlike a lot of other devices. Not that they cant do it … just that plex wont. For example for every version of xbox (last time I looked) there is only 1 profile for xbox. All Xbox are not the same. I am using appletv now which works ok most of the time. EMBY works all the time. Transcoding 4k with emby is crazy fast while plex just twitches all over.
You might be able to go into plex and edit the device profile. If you can get it to not transcode and just direct play the audio you should be golden. GOOD Luck!!
