I am debating on whether to pick up an NVidia Shield TV or an XBox One S. If the XBox supports 1:1 Blu-Ray rips with DTS HD-MA and Dolby TrueHD, I will likely go for that. Does anyone know if this works? It is crucial that it can play the rips without server-side transcoding.
No high def audio works at this point. The Plex server will turn it into aac or ac3.
Bummer. Shield TV it is.
It is a huge bummer! It drives me nuts because I have such a great audio system with all of these movies with HD audio. But I guess it’s not plexs fault, it’s a Microsoft thing allegedly.
The machine clearly has the hardware for it and I know it is capable of playing those codecs, due to the Blu-Ray player. I wonder what the impediment is.
@scurtis said:
The machine clearly has the hardware for it and I know it is capable of playing those codecs, due to the Blu-Ray player. I wonder what the impediment is.
From what has been shown with consoles HD audio is not normally released beyond playback directly from a disc.
With that being said, the big hold back will be Microsoft. Plex is limited to the codecs that Microsoft releases on the platform. No DTS codec has been released so anything from DTS to DTS-MA is not supported. TrueHD has a possibility, but there hasn’t been a decoder released for that. As far as I know the TrueHD spec does not include a core track so if there isn’t a specific decoder for TrueHD the standard AC3 decoder can’t just pull out a core audio track (which is the case for a DTS-MA track)
From what I can see with the XBOX one it does some funny things with audio out over HDMI.
You can select between lossless, or bitstream. You would think, yes I can use the bitstream coming from my Bluray to send to my amp for decoding…Well no.
The XBOX appears to decode and then re-encode audio on the HDMI to whatever format you select. You can sit there with nothing playing and change between the various modes of audio out of the XBOX and the amp will change accordingly. I guess the DTS and Dolby options are there in case your amp doesn’t do LPCM.
But it does seem strange that although it plays Blurays internally, the audio out isn’t quite right.
I imagine this has something to do with the console having to mux it’s own sounds into the “mix” before sounds are output.
How would they add their own audio from the system while maintaining the source audio codec from a file played in an app?
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it sounds like it could be difficult to me. Does the PS3 pass bitstream from apps through it’s HDMI port?
That´s most definitely it.
But I assume they could just deactivate all other audio when video apps are in “HD-Audio Passthrough Mode” 
The problem will be that MS wants a consistant user experience because otherwise they get support questions: “No audio notification when playing a BR-Movie” and so on.
Is it possible to passthrough the HD audio from the Xbox One S to the home cinema though?
External HDD->PC (server)->Router->Xbox One S->Home Theater (audio)->TV (video)?
@The120DaysofSodom said:
Is it possible to passthrough the HD audio from the Xbox One S to the home cinema though?
No. The Xbox wants to decode all the audio sent to it (presumably to mux in system sounds etc) before outputting the sound. Because of that the audio needs to be in a format the Xbox One can decode.
I ended up putting the embedded version of Plex Media Player on an MSI Cubi i3 mini-PC and calling it a day. I am going to use a Roku Ultra for everything else.
Here are Xbox One S supported audio formats: Vorbis, Opus, AC-3, DTS, PCM, LPCM, FLAC, ALAC, MLP/Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, DTS-HD Master Audio is not supported.
