I’m considering to move from using “regular” H.264 Blu-Ray encodes for my TV-show and movie library over to using H.264 Blu-Ray remuxes. The reasoning is quite simple. I got the space, and I want the better image quality from higher bitrate video. After I replaced my Pioneer Kuro LX5090H 50-inch Plasma with a LG OLED65B6V 65-inch OLED it has become blatantly obvious that source quality is more important than ever.
My problem is the norm of using lossless audio codecs in remuxes. The most common thing is to use 5.1 and 7.1 FLAC for remuxes. That’s all fine and dandy, but how do Plex Media Server and the Plex Clients handle multi-channel FLAC?
Neither my Apple TV (Gen.4), my TV (WebOS 3.0) or my Sonos Play Bar and Sonos Surroud system is capable of handling multi-channel FLAC on their own. WebOS 3.0 running Plex might be able to handle multi-channel FLAC, but it won’t be capable of transcoding it into multi-channel PCM and pass it over to my Sonos Play Bar using optical so at best I would end up with stereo/2.0 PCM.
My main client is the Apple TV, and I suppose the Apple TV itself is able to handle multi-channel AAC. But my Sonos Play Bar won’t deal with multi-channel AAC and I suspect my TV would simply transcode the multi-channel AAC into stereo PCM before passing it over optical to my Sonos system regardless.
Is Plex Media Server capable of transcoding multi-channel FLAC into multi-channel AC-3 / Dolby Digital? I can’t seem to find any specific settings for this on my Plex Media Server so it’s hard for me to tell how it would actually handle multi-channel FLAC or multi-channel AAC.
