I have a home with speakers in nearly every room indoor and even some outdoors. In fact, 16 pairs, each powered by a combination of receivers and Chromecast audio on the multi-channel input.
When I play video content in Plex on my Samsung Note 20 Ultra or Tab S7+ tablets, the Chromecast audio devices don’t show up, unfortunately. Only the Chromecast video devices do.
As a workaround, I am using the Google Home app to cast the entire Android device’s audio to a Chromecast audio of my choice.
This works great, except for one problem : lip-sync problems. The Android device audio gets buffered before it reaches the Chromecast audio. And thus, the audio is significantly behind the video.
How far behind ? Approximately 1 second, by the measurements I just did. Enough to make almost any program unwatchable.
What’s the fix ?
One fix would be for Plex to send the video’s audio stream directly to the Chromecast audio. Presumably, there would be much less than a 1 second delay in doing that. There might still be some delay, though.
Another fix would be for Plex to continue playing the video and audio on the local Android device, but play the audio 1 second ahead of the video, to compensate for the audio delay. Or, said another way, play the video 1 second behind the audio.
I realize the Chromecast audio is now an extinct device, but many of us still have them. Also, it’s unlikely to be the last network audio streaming device suffering from this problem. Surely, lipsync would be an issue for Sonos devices too, even though it might be less than 1 second ? Or does Plex not allow playing videos’s audio tracks onto Sonos speakers either ?
Either way, it seems to me that a configurable delay for audio/video would be a useful feature to have in the Plex player, especially on mobile devices, but not necessarily only for those.
