I would like another option for a movie library that is used for music mixed in 5.1. I have several MKV files ripped from DVD-A and Blu-Ray Audio for 5.1 surround mixes. I’ve loaded them in a normal movie library, but it would be great to have these either appear as “extra content” in a Premium Music Library, or their own special Surround Music Library where it functions similarly to a movie library, but has tags that are more in line with a music library.
Extract the raw DTS streams, name them as per the naming guide for music files and you can use them in a normal music library.
Muxing them into MKA files is also possible.
I’ve done it with several albums from DVD-A.
They will play in all plex clients as music (transcoded down to stereo), but with PMP you will get surround sound.
@OttoKerner said:
Extract the raw DTS streams, name them as per the naming guide for music files and you can use them in a normal music library.
This is what I’ve been doing. The “video” content on these discs is usually just a still image designed to destroy plasma and OLED screens anyway. I have a Python script for easy extraction (using ffmpeg) of tracks from a single MP4 or MKV container if anyone’s interested.
Muxing them into MKA files is also possible.
Cool. I had tried MKV, which is ignored in a music library. MKA does indeed work. Would you just do that so you can tag the files with metadata, or are there other reasons?
They will play in all plex clients as music (transcoded down to stereo), but with PMP you will get surround sound.
I’ll take a look at PMP, but really have no plans to hook a computer to my TV when I have Apple TV (4th gen) and PS4 already.
The PS4 seems to play DTS and LPCM correctly, except that the last few seconds of DTS tracks are dropped. 
As for Apple TV, if you play a video containing DTS, it gets transcoded nicely to AC3. Why can’t it do the same for DTS and LPCM in a music library?
@Skurfer87 said:
Cool. I had tried MKV, which is ignored in a music library. MKA does indeed work. Would you just do that so you can tag the files with metadata, or are there other reasons?
Actually there is no reason. AFAIK Plex doesn’t currently read any metadata from mka files. So you might as well stick to the raw DTS files.
As for Apple TV, if you play a video containing DTS, it gets transcoded nicely to AC3. Why can’t it do the same for DTS and LPCM in a music library?
Most likely simply because none of the developers has envisoned this as a use case. Plex and/or Apple devs, that is.
@OttoKerner said:
AFAIK Plex doesn’t currently read any metadata from mka files. So you might as well stick to the raw DTS files.
It might be worth it for future portability. Nothing against future-Plex. I’ve been using iTunes for 12+ years, but I still don’t want it to be the canonical (or only) source of metadata.
Most likely simply because none of the developers has envisoned this as a use case. Plex and/or Apple devs, that is.
Very plausible. I feel a feature request comin’ on, but to be fair, I want to spend some time with PMP first to find out if this use case is still getting overlooked.
@Skurfer87 said:
@OttoKerner said:
AFAIK Plex doesn’t currently read any metadata from mka files. So you might as well stick to the raw DTS files.
It might be worth it for future portability. Nothing against future-Plex. I’ve been using iTunes for 12+ years, but I still don’t want it to be the canonical (or only) source of metadata.
Have you found a way to stick music metadata into an mka file, yet? Which software is able to do it?
@OttoKerner said:
Have you found a way to stick music metadata into an mka file, yet? Which software is able to do it?
No, but I haven’t put any serious effort into it yet. I’ll let you know if I do. Please do the same.
I’ve created a complimentary (or perhaps competing) request.
In any case, it’s related, so please “Like” if it sounds good. Thanks.
1 Like
I tried this, @OttoKerner:
ffmpeg -i song.dts -acodec copy -metadata title="A Cool Song" -metadata track="1" -metadata artist="Rock Star" "01 - Song.mka"
Then ran mkvinfo on the resulting file. All the data is there and looks correct to my untrained eye. Playing it in VLC shows the Title and Author columns filled in, so I’d say it worked.
The only thing to figure out is how to add an album cover. I know the MKA format supports it, just don’t know how to do it.
I also asked this question of @plex on Twitter to confirm that Multi-channel AAC files can be used. So, I was obviously over thinking this problem. The output from DVD Audio Extractor can be easily used (and tagged for that matter).
Thanks for you answers!
@NOForker said:
I also asked this question of @plex on Twitter to confirm that Multi-channel AAC files can be used. So, I was obviously over thinking this problem. The output from DVD Audio Extractor can be easily used (and tagged for that matter).
While that may be true, keep in mind that AAC is not what is on the discs. There, it is usually AC3 or DTS, rarely PCM. Those are the formats I’d be storing because they don’t need to be converted. Every conversion is a lossy process. So avoid doing that.
@OttoKerner said:
While that may be true, keep in mind that AAC is not what is on the discs. There, it is usually AC3 or DTS, rarely PCM. Those are the formats I’d be storing because they don’t need to be converted. Every conversion is a lossy process. So avoid doing that.
Do you have recommended tools for doing so? I’ve been using DVD Audio Extractor, which will also do Blu-ray Discs. I want to be sure that I can also add meta data to the files before going into Plex.
Thanks again for your help and insights!
Use what ever gets the job done. It’s been a while since I happended about a DVD-Audio, so my know-how is surely outdated.
makemkv rips the data from both DVD and BR unchanged into MKVs.
I then take these and demux the audio streams from them. Thus I get ‘naked’ audio data streams
Neither .dts nor .ac3 nor .PCM support internal metadata.
PCM is easy though, as this can be converted losslessly into Flac.
DTS and AC3 I just leave be and name their files as required by the official naming guide for music files (+ the required folder structure). This is usually enough to show up correctly in the library.
Here is how to do it with multi-disc albums.
You can try to put them into .mka files. As @Skurfer87 above demonstrated this supports internal metadata. But currently Plex doesn’t read those from .mka files.
And software which is able to write metadata into MKA files is not widely available anyway (yet).
@OttoKerner said:
Use what ever gets the job done. It’s been a while since I happended about a DVD-Audio, so my know-how is surely outdated.
I just read on the DVD Audio Extractor website that it will “demux audio streams directly to mlp, pcm, mpa, ac3 or dts files.” So, it looks like I may already have all the tools I need for Surround Audio!
OK. So, I have several discs that have audio in MLP. I’ve tried adding them to my library as multichannel ALAC and FLAC, but they are transcoded to MP3 in both cases on my Apple TV 4. I tried adding the MLP files directly, but they do not get added to the library during an update.
Is there a different format that may trigger Plex to transcode to a multichannel format (AC3) so it will play on this device? This is the same problem that made me start this thread to begin with. I have discs with 5.1 audio in different formats, MLP, DTS-HD and DTS. The ones that have DTS make sense if I can add the DTS files directly to a Plex Music library, but what about MLP?
I’d recommend you to convert them into multichannel Flac format. It is way more compatible and the conversion is lossless.
And Flac supports internal metadata. What’s not to like?
OK. So, I have several discs that have audio in MLP. I’ve tried adding them to my library as multichannel ALAC and FLAC, but they are transcoded to MP3 in both cases on my Apple TV 4.
See my feature request linked earlier. The Apple TV Plex client appears to only support surround formats in a movie library. Everything in a music library will be covered to stereo. Currently, I think Plex Media Player on a full-blown computer is the only way to (almost) play these tracks correctly.
If you’re interested in attaching metadata to your files outside Plex (which I obviously am), I’ve created a couple of scripts to put the original untouched data in an MKA container with cover art and all.
One script is for pulling the individual tracks out of a single MKV or M4V created with things like Handbrake or MakeMKV and tagging them. I prefer Handbrake, as it lets you provide names for each track before extraction.
The other is for taking a folder full of raw DTS/AC3/PCM tracks that you’ve already split and putting them into containers with metadata.
I’ll share a link once I have the stuff on GitHub.
I have successfully pulled tracks out of a DVD with MLP for what it’s worth, but that’s an entire post of its own.
@OttoKerner said:
I’d recommend you to convert them into multichannel Flac format. It is way more compatible and the conversion is lossless.
And Flac supports internal metadata. What’s not to like?
Do you know if multichannel FLAC would get transcoded to stereo in any PMP releases? I’m considering building a Raspberry Pi 2 solution for Surround Sound Music instead of relying on Plex for Apple TV.
If your AVR supports L-PCM, then you’ll get 5.1 PCM @48kHz over HDMI, I assume.
A post was split to a new topic: .dts files not being found
