Couple of questions from a new user

[ac16161]

Just trying out Plex for the first time. I am an established Kodi user, I have a large collection of blu-ray and UHD mkv’s. My standard playback devices are Vero 4K’s and Raspberry Pi’s.

I just tried the Apple TV Plex client, with a Plex server running on my Synology NAS. I tried some 4K mkv’s and picture quality is great, but I have two issues:

1. Quite a few of my mkv’s have two subtitle tracks, one with full subs, the other just for the foreign-language scenes. The default track is marked in the mkv file and Kodi automatically enables the relevant track, just like watching a disc. I tried one of these titles via the Plex client and I had to enable the forced-sub track manually - not a good start. Is there something I need to do to edit the sub-flags to allow Plex automatically to display the forced subs without user intervention, so that Plex can be as seamless to use as Kodi?

2. I tried several mkv’s with hi-res audio via the Apple TV client, and the lip-sync was just terrible. I guess there is some transcoding going on due to the lack of hi-res passthrough. That said, on my Kodi devices, PCM transcoding is in sync, though with the Vero 4K I just use passthrough.

Can anyone recommend a better device than the Apple TV on which to run the Plex client? e.g. the nvidia Shield? At the moment this is just for experimenting, in case it’s possible to achieve DV support with hi-res audio passthrough to my AVR.

Thanks.

[JCHH]

Firstly, try using the free version on Infuse on the AppleTV.

[ac16161]

Thanks for the tip, nice to be able to play my mkv’s from the NAS via the Apple TV if I need to and I prefer the Infuse app to Plex, avoids the need for anything to run server-side. Infuse seems to be somewhat well featured, though playback of native interlaced 1080 content is pretty terrible on all deinterlacing options, perhaps a limitation of the Apple TV as I have seen that with another app. Kodi on the Pi and the Vero handles such content much better.