I started to put this under an existing discussion, but as it was already marked as “answered” and it wasn’t exactly the same question, I’m opening a new question.
I’m trying to figure out if there is any high res music format that can play back without being transcoded / downsampled. My PMS is running on unRAID, my client is a nVidea Shield, and I’m trying to play high res multi channel audio.
Using Multi-channel FLAC:
- It seems to play fine on my Windows 10 PC (will check again tonight to see if it’s transcoding).
- The first time I tried to play on the Shield I got broken up garbage. After the first playback, the FLAC files would crash the transcoder and wouldn’t play. I restarted the server and the Shield, same result. Note CD’s ripped to FLAC playback fine, though I have never looked to see if it was transcoding either.
Using Multi-channel WAV:
- They play but it is transcoding to AAC (I think, would have to double check). I don’t think an AAC file is near the resolution of the WAV. Wouldn’t a .WAV file be pretty generic? I can’t believe the Shield won’t play a WAV so why is it transcoding at all?
I have not tried .dsf files but can work on that attempt tonight. DSF would be my preferred solution, and I think they are supposed to be recognized by PMS but will not play without transcoding. That is what lead me to the flac/wav solution as I figured they would at least not need to run through the transcoder engine (but seemingly not the case).
I saw comments suggesting this being driven by the client’s playback ability, here is the only thing I could find on the shield website:
SHIELD supports 7.1 and 5.1 surround sound pass through over HDMI. It also supports high-res audio playback up to 24-bit/192 kHz over HDMI and USB and high-res audio upsample to 24-bit/192 hHz over USB. On SHIELD controller, the 3.5 mm headphone jack supports a mic and stereo headphone combo.
I can’t believe the Shield won’t play a flac or wav file natively.
Any thoughts on how to get either of these formats to play at high resolution would be appreciated.
@trumpy81 said:
This article may be of some assistance to you: Recommended passthrough audio settings for SPMC, NVIDIA Shield TV and AV Receivers · koying/SPMC Wiki · GitHub
Plex will play .dsf files, but you should probably follow the instructions given in the above article in order to have successful playback using the Shield and your AV Receiver.
Thanks for this. I will read up later today.
I did check last night, and it seems ALL music being sent to the Shield is transcoded to AAC. This includes, all stereo flac and MP3.
Does that sound right?
@trumpy81 said:
This article may be of some assistance to you: Recommended passthrough audio settings for SPMC, NVIDIA Shield TV and AV Receivers · koying/SPMC Wiki · GitHub
Plex will play .dsf files, but you should probably follow the instructions given in the above article in order to have successful playback using the Shield and your AV Receiver.
OK I read through this. The specific instructions are for a SPMC which I believe is a similar to Plex media server application, but the “expert settings” are different. The plex settings are quite different and I have set everything to stream direct that I can find. However, the settings are not as detailed. I have the Shield set to “passthrough” both in the OS settings and the Plex settings. However, Plex is still transcoding to AAC.
I have not tried a dsf file yet, do you believe that would pass-through direct? I can try tonight.
Should I be trying to convert form dsf to PCM?
@trumpy81 said:
Yes, that link is concerning SPMC, but the focus was on the hardware setup not the software. If you don’t have the hardware setup correctly, then you will not get multi-channel sound at all. If your TV only outputs 2 channel audio, then you will not get multi-channel sound.
There should be no need to convert the .dsf file, you may try it though, provided you have things setup correctly, it should play just fine, fingers crossed.
The hardware is set up correctly. movies with DTS HD and TrueHD stream and passthrough fine. ALL music is getting transcoded to AAC, and I can’t find any reason for it or way to turn it off.
@trumpy81 said:
In that case, I will have to refer you to the Nvidia Shield Forum. Someone there might be able to help you.
https://forums.plex.tv/categories/nvidia-shield
similar question posted there. We’ll see.
One step forward last night. I has been changing the settings for “passthrough” but found one last night for “direct play” It was set to auto, but changing “direct play” to “forced” made it send the WAV files through without transcoding and there was an obvious audible improvement.
I tried with the dsf files. Plex did recognize dsf, but the transocder crashed on the dsf file and it would not “direct play.”
