Hi,
I have troubles watching a movie with sound encoded with multi-channel sound on my android-tv box (xiaomi mi box s). Where AC3, DTS, … is correctly passed through my amplifier, AAC 5.1 and HE-AAC 5.1 are sent as stereo.
Since amplifier codec support varies a lot, wouldn’t it be possible to add an option to transcode sound to AC3 on the client side (when a multi-channel audio is played) ? This is done when using the chromecast feature on the same mi box s, using the plex app on my phone.
Also, this is an option available in Kodi. To it is definitely possible on plain android-tv.
so finally discovered how to do this on android tv…after almost a year of frustration. If you go to settings and change the pass through setting to optical, a new option for optical encodings appears…which I set to ac3 and dts.
I finally now have plex transcoding all my aac 5.1 and 7.1 to dolby digital ac3.
Hope this might work for you
Thanks a lot for your answer !
So, I tried on my mibox s device, and setting the pass through to optical breaks everything for me:
When I try to play a video, it stands on the waiting round forever … And if I set this pass through back to hdmi, I can play the video again… but in stereo (arg…)
On which hardware does your android TV run ?
Darn, sorry it didn’t work. I have a shield tv, and a Sony TV (which also runs android tv). This all feeds into a yamaha receiver.
Not sure why this isn’t working for you, havent changed any other settings. My plex server, when it comes across a aac 5.1 file now direct streams the video and shows transcode to ac3 5.1 with no change in how it takes to start the process.
I suppose there might be a specific issue with with your server and transcoding (what are u using). The only thing I did differently (which you didn’t mention you did, but perhaps you did it) was to specifically specify Dts and ac3 in the optical settings.
My plex server is 1.19.3.2764
My plex player is 8.0.2.17816
Hope that helps…j
Ok.; I think this is an other incompatibility between the mibox-s last update and the androidtv plex app, whoever being responsible for this incompatibility…
But if I understand well, this setup makes the SEVER transcode. And this is not optimal at all since this wastes CPU/memory resources on the server, and (more important) network bandwidth, since an AC3 stream is much bigger that an HE-AAC 5.1 one.
Yes its definitely a server transcode, it does use more bandwidth though in the grand scheme of things not an enormous amount (especially HD OR 4K video), and primarily on your home network. For me the main issue was my yamaha reciever wouldn’t decode AAC so short of re-encoding the files, it was my best solution.
Good luck figuring a work around.
2021 clean-up: duplicate
