Direct Play

General Discussions
1

i use handbrake often whereas i got pretty decent with it…ive noticed it doesnt like to downmix to aac 2.0 stereo some of the time with wow and flutter…blurays and dvd rips from MKV…i always remove subtitles so im wondering can PLEX direct play a mp4 movie using H264 at 3500 kbps and aac 2.0 at 224 kbps and maybe a passthrough of the AC3 5.1 or can it only direct play a file with only one audio stream

2

@“Chris W.” said:
i use handbrake often whereas i got pretty decent with it…ive noticed it doesnt like to downmix to aac 2.0 stereo some of the time with wow and flutter…blurays and dvd rips from MKV…i always remove subtitles so im wondering can PLEX direct play a mp4 movie using H264 at 3500 kbps and aac 2.0 at 224 kbps and maybe a passthrough of the AC3 5.1 or can it only direct play a file with only one audio stream

Look you will need to publish the xml file example to further offer some advise

3

Plex can easily direct play a mp4 file with multiple audio streams, whether aac, ac3, or others. It depends on what audio formats are supported by your Plex client. For example, if you play a video with ac3 audio, but your client does not support ac3, Plex will transcode the audio to a format compatible with your client.

Try downmixing multi-channel ac3 & dts to AAC Dolby Pro Logic II instead of 2.0 stereo. You can also passthrough the AC3 audio stream w/o issue.

Whether or not Plex will Direct Play how you’re transcoding things is a separate issue. If it does not, then, as @SE56 states, more information is needed.

While playing the movie, go to Status -> Now Playing: https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/status/playing It will tell you if Plex is direct playing / direct streaming / transcoding the movie.

Example: Plex Web / Chrome playing movie with H264 video & AC3 5.1 audio in MP4 container. Plex transcodes audio as Chrome does not support AC3 audio.

Include the XML info for the movie. See Investigate Media Information and Formats for info on how to pull XML.

Also include some info about your setup. What client & version, what version PMS, etc.