Title basically.
I’ve noticed a lot of stuff is really quiet then really loud similar to a Christopher Nolan film and I think it’s related to the source having 5.1 surround sound audio.
I assumed plex would auto-mixdown in this scenario where it’s playing on something that doesn’t have surround sound.
Am I missing something obvious or is this not something that Plex does? It seems like it would be a feature.
Edit:: AC3 not AAC
The answer to this question is still not clear to me.
It’s becoming increasingly frustrating as I sometimes can’t use plex because the audio is so nolany
Plex does automatic mixdown to stereo, if the player device knows that it only has 2 speakers.
It is also quite dependent on the type of Plex client, so please state what you are using on which hardware.
Mixdown to stereo doesn’t mean that it’s also reducing the dynamic range (the original dynamic range on DVD and Bluray can be quite high, which is what you are probably describing as “nolany”).
There is one type of Plex client which can perform dynamic range comprression on the fly An on-demand audio dynamics compressor for PMP and Plex HTPC
All other clients will not change the dynamic range. You will have to create an additional stereo audio track yourself and apply dynamic range compression: [How To] Downmix Surround Sound To AAC Stereo Properly (using FFmpeg Batch Converter)
I’m using Plex media player for Linux desktop and sometimes casting from an android phone to a Chromecast HD.
There is no mention of any mixdown from the 5.1 audio to stereo in the area of the Plex desktop application where you can see user sessions and whether they’re transcoding or not.
I do not believe it is the dynamic range that is the issue. For example, switching audio track to the stereo director’s commentary track is noticeably louder and less prone to such weird and random changes in volume.
The changes in volume are not consistent with the content loudness, but rather usually with the position of the origin of the sound (as far as I can tell, though it may be placebo).
You can be sure that the commentary track has been processed differently than the main audio track. So that is a fallacy.
This can be a hint at the source of the issue: Most likely your problem is that the Plex app doesn’t “know” that you have only 2 speakers. So it sends the 5.1 audio unaltered. Which cuases you to hear only Front Left and Front Right signals. And these carry usually only ambient sounds, while the main portion of dialog language is on the Center channel.
So your main issue might be the configuration of your player and its speakers.
Is there a way to force stereo in the player configuration?
In Plex Desktop surely. However, “Plex Media Player” is the name of a retired product.
Which software are you actually using?
There is the Plex Web app which runs in a web browser.
There is Plex (Desktop) for Linux,
and there is Plex HTPC.
The latter two provide audio configuration in their settings, which should be able to force a proper mixdown to stereo.
This naming scheme makes it very difficult to differentiate, but the version of plex I am using on my linux desktop will be whatever the up-to-date one is unless it has changed very recently.
Looking at the downloads page provides no useful information on how to differentiate it by name.
When I open the application it’s simply called ‘Plex’. In the settings within it’s called ‘Plex for Linux’ (Version 1.78.2.3975-c5bd0cbb).
Within the settings of the plex application I can go to player and then select output audio device (some of which state stereo output), but that’s specifying an audio device rather than a mixdown configuration across any of the local machine’s audio devices.
That is Plex Desktop for Linux.
If you select a particular audio device, instead of leaving it on “auto select”, you should get additional controls which allow you to pick the number of audio channels. Make sure to select “2.0 stereo”.
Thank you so much for your help!
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