@nibbles:
Oh wonders! Revisiting this topic after recent upgrades to PMP media player & Plex server I discovered that the Setup 2 in this thread now works perfectly!
E.g. playing back multi-channel high-res audio to PMP is not transcoded in any way. It’s straight to the receiver in the source format. Verified with different sources up to 192Khz sampling frequency.
Much appreciated!
Now I can enjoy my full music collection via Plex. Multi-Channel audio is a lot of fun.
I tried as well with Setup 1 (e.g. NVIDIA Shield as player) though with less success.
It (as mentioned by others in this thread) now reverts to Stereo. Though Plex server says that it plays ‘Direct’ without transcoding. Thus think this is the Plex client.
Thanks again for the progress here. At least the PMP route works (which I use for the main HiFi setup).
All of these issues and many more would be fixed by updating to the latest version of exoplayer or better yet switching it to something even better.
Please vote so they finally update their antiquated exoplayer in their plex app from several years ago to the latest version or better yet switch to something better eg VLC, MXplayer, nPlayer, BSPlayer, MPV.
Guess what? If they updated their built in exoplayer or better yet switched to something better, you’d get all these functionalities and more!
Add my frustration to the pile. Everything was working perfectly well via the Plex app on my Xbox One S. Bitstream output to my receiver was providing wonderful 5.1 music from FLAC files on my server. Suddenly, I only get 2 channels even though the received seems to see bitstreams for 5.1. All of the other channels seem to be dead air. No settings where changed anywhere - I guess a Plex server update did this unexpectedly?
Same thing happening here, I have the latest Server on MAC, and can’t go past 48Khz on my iPad with an external DAC, not even playing on the same MAC that the server it’s on, on a browser, all I get is 48Khz.
As some of you, I can get every Sample rate(44, 48, 88, 96khz) on Plex for Kodi. But that only works on the PC, the app is no longer available on iPad.
I don’t know if it worked before, this is my first time using it. And Streaming high res music is my main reason for paying for Plex.
So, will this be solved, or the feature is completely removed?
Also, something very strange happens on the AppleTV version of Plex, all my music plays as PCM multichannel, ALL OF IT, not only the multichannel flacs. I can make them all Stereo, by selecting Stereo on the appleTV settings, but if you don’t select, and leave it in auto, it automatically makes all music files multichannel.
Server version 1.20.2.3402 and an update on my XBox Plex client has resolved the issue for me that started over the summer. Multichannel FLAC is being encoded correctly in AAC and coming through fine again in 5.1.
Thanks for the fix.
Next: could you please consider a lossless codec for 5.1 music sometime in the future?
Thanks @CJLocos for the post.
I checked today and found that finally multi-channel playback via PMP works in native resolution (I checked up to 5.1 with 24/96, e.g. Setup 2).
This is great and closes (part of) the pain-point outlined in my original post. Happy for the progress (albeit 1 year later).
Checked again playback on Nvidia Shield and there the situation remains unresolved.
No high-res multichannel, and no highres stereo either (e.g. Setup 1).
Though grateful for the progress. I was looking into Roon as a alternative for audio, but its inconvenient to switch between different playback solutions depending on the content.
