Hi, I’m working on building my Plex movie library and my main objective is to replicate the video and audio quality of BDs using Plex. I’m using Make MKV to rip my discs, naming the file, then moving them into my Plex movie folder. My Plex server is a fairly high end Windows 10 PC. I’ve got a question and a technical issue.
What Plex client connected to my Home Theater receiver will give me the best AV quality?
I’m currently using a 4th gen AppleTV but I’m wondering if the Nvidia Shield would provide better Audio or video quality as well as not stutter like my AppleTV does on the Sony, Warner, and other ripped BDs referred to in the link below
@kegobeer-plex said:
The Shield TV doesn’t transcode anything, so that’s a good choice. Same goes for a RPI3 or Intel NUC running the embedded PMP.
The shield only plays VOBSUB subtitles if it can Direct Play the file. I am not sure it handles VC-1 video well.
So if you need subtitles, I’d opt for the Raspberry Pi 3 (or an Odroid C2 if you want 4K and HEVC)
@kegobeer-plex said:
The Shield TV doesn’t transcode anything, so that’s a good choice. Same goes for a RPI3 or Intel NUC running the embedded PMP.
The shield only plays VOBSUB subtitles if it can Direct Play the file. I am not sure it handles VC-1 video well.
So if you need subtitles, I’d opt for the Raspberry Pi 3 (or an Odroid C2 if you want 4K and HEVC)
I skip subtitles except for embedded ones, so I didn’t think about that. Thanks. VC-1 sucks as a video codec, but since TrueHD is supported now it direct plays fine on the Shield TV. Before that any titles with TrueHD required video to be transcoded along with the audio.
So I guess the solution was staring me in the face all along but my Plex Media server can do double duty and be my Plex Media Player as well. I ran an HDMI cable to it and connected that to my Denon Receiver and everything shows up great. My Denon now actually shows me the correct Audio format now on the little display as well. So I used to see “Multi Channel audio” when watching movies on my AppleTV and BD Player now the little display shows DTS Master Audio and Dolby True HD. The audio and video quality seem fine to me and I’m fairly picky but I"m sure upgrading the video and audio hardware in the future might improve things. It’s using the Asus onboard hardware for Audio and Video, which is Intel Graphics and standard audio hardware.
MrMC on the Apple TV 4 is a Kodi fork that supports Plex. It can playback everything without transcoding except for VC-1 files. You just don’t get bitstreaming lossless audio (you get PCM lossless audio), and no 24p refresh rate switching.
This thread is amusing in that the OP asked to replicate the original quality of the BD video and audio and many posted with suggestions that do not accomplish that. The Roku and AppleTV will not replicate the original quality of the audio. I cannot speak for the others, but those two will not accomplish the task. Then there’s the BDs that have VC-1 for video. If the client cannot play VC-1, then it cannot replicate the original quality of the BDs that have VC-1 video. It’s not like one has a choice between H.264 and VC-1 BDs; a movie comes as one or the other. I found that about 10% of the BDs have VC-1 video, so it must be considered. It’s hard to find devices outside of a general purpose computer that do all of this.
Personally, I use an Intel NUC (Haswell generation because it was the newest when I bought it) where I run either OpenPHT embedded or Plex Media Player embedded depending on which I feel like testing at the time. Both play the raw rips directly with no transcoding required at all, though it should be noted that you have to disable HW decoding of VC-1 since the driver doesn’t decode it quite right (I think this is a linux only issue). As such, you may want one with enough CPU to decode VC-1 in software. Mine is an i5 Haswell and it has no issues decoding VC-1 in software in real-time.
The Shield is more than capable of playing back an MKV file at the original quality (no transcoding) with either H.264 or VC-1 codecs. Kodi users do this all the time, and all they have on the back end is network or USB storage - there isn’t a media server per se. It’s always possible that the Plex Client won’t be aware of these capabilities and will ask the server to transcode something that didn’t really need it - but that’s not been my experience. Heck, you can even run PMS right on the Shield if you want to.
Also, nVidia released an update to the Shield at CES this week that also added Dolby Atmos pass-thru support. I think that means it now supports every conceivable audio format available on BD.
At $200 it’s one of the most expensive set top box around, but it does way more than 2X what the $100 boxes will do.
Personally, I transcode the video all of my Blu-rays in very high quality to get around any VC-1 or compatibility issues,. As an additional bonus, the filesizes are reduced. You’d be surprised how well newer movies compress while retaining quality.
I’m with gbooker02. I run PMP, but on top of Windows 7. My entire collection is Blu-Rays moved losslessly to MKV container. PMP on Windows7 will play any video format in them I’ve seen without transcoding and it passes the audio, including DTS-MA and TrueHD, on to the receiver. A nice bonus is it’ll kick the video card into 24FPS output, which more closely matches the 23.96FPS framerate of the Blu-Ray video.
I was able to find motherboard with a fanless AMD CPU that still has plenty of power to do the work. It pulls so little power that I’m able to run a PS that only kicks on the fan when it needs to. It has yet to. So it’s completely silent. I’ve been running about a year now pretty rock solid. The big downside is cost. I think it cost me $450 to put together.
@mheere said:
The Shield is more than capable of playing back an MKV file at the original quality (no transcoding) with either H.264 or VC-1 codecs. Kodi users do this all the time, and all they have on the back end is network or USB storage - there isn’t a media server per se. It’s always possible that the Plex Client won’t be aware of these capabilities and will ask the server to transcode something that didn’t really need it - but that’s not been my experience. Heck, you can even run PMS right on the Shield if you want to.
Also, nVidia released an update to the Shield at CES this week that also added Dolby Atmos pass-thru support. I think that means it now supports every conceivable audio format available on BD.
At $200 it’s one of the most expensive set top box around, but it does way more than 2X what the $100 boxes will do.
TrueHD/Atmos support came a few months ago with the 3.3 update.
