It seems in further testing, that most of my initial thoughts are not correct. I’m not even sure what all is really going on, but maybe some advanced engineer can fill in the gaps. For players that don’t provide the info, I’m using Tautulli to tell me if its transcoding or not.
I decided one player was not a good ‘test’ environment, I also connected my PC via HDMI to my AVR, connected a newer Chromecast to the AVR and lastly a Fire 4k stick (In addition the the Origitnal Fire TV) to the AVR and now have some interesting results.
While the above post is true about Fire TV and Netflix working properly with Dolby Digital Plus, the AVR properly displays it while in the Netflix application. It seems maybe my ‘Original Fire TV’ was never working with Plex properly for DD or for DTS?
Dolby Digital Files:
-If I take an 5.1 EAC3 movie file and load it up over the network through Windows Media Player, my AVR now displays Dolby D+. PCM is gone at this point. Obviously not going through Plex for this, just straight to the file in my Plex library.
-This same file over Plex for Fire TV shows PCM and PLII on AVR .
Playback Info shows Direct Play (EAC3 5.1)
-This same file over Chromecast shows Dolby Digital Plus on AVR
Playback Info shows Direct Play (EAC3 5.1)
-This same file in Fire TV 4k shows Dolby Digital Plus on AVR
Playback Info shows Direct Play (EAC3 5.1)
DTS Files:
-If I take a 5.1 DTS movie file and load it up over the network through Windows Media Player, AVR now displays dts logo. PCM is no longer there either.
-This same file over Plex for Original Fire TV shows PCM and multichannel on AVR.
Playback info shows Direct Play (DTS 5.1)
-This same file over Chromecast shows Dolby Digital (not plus) on AVR
Playback info shows transcoding from DCA 5.1 to AC3 5.1
-This same file over Fire TV 4k shows Dolby Digital Plus
Playback info oddly shows Direct Play (DCA 5.1) Sound seems weird…low vocals, surround seems excessive.
Not really sure what else I can do, but, this seems all over the place with only the PC being able to handle both sets properly. Clearly I can’t go using Windows Medial Player all the time skipping Plex entirely.
