I just upgraded from a Roku Ultra to a Shield and am loving it so far.
One nifty feature Roku has is switching on “night mode” audio. This tells the Plex server to downmix any surround tracks to AAC stereo. I think it also reduces DRC/normalizes volume too.
This feature is a godsend when the kids are sleeping as loud sounds (eg., explosions, shooting) are lowered while dialog is increased so it can be heard better without constantly having to reach for the remote to change volume.
Is there a way to enable something like this on Shield? I see in Shield system settings you can disable surround sound however Plex doesn’t seem to honor this.
i don’t believe the shield has any setting to do this.
can’t you just manually select the stereo audio track during such times when you don’t want surround?
Most videos I play don’t have a stereo track, only a 5.1 or 7.1 stream. I want the Plex server to downmix/transcode on the fly so I don’t have to reencode the tracks myself.
The Shield has an advanced audio system settings option to disable surround sound but Plex doesn’t change anything when this is on.
I had the same problems and the simplest solution is to force the audio transcoding with a workaroud in the Shield Plex Player. Set audio passthrough to → Optical (not HDMI) → deactivate DTS and AC3 and voila everything is transcoded in AAC stereo and the volume is even with easily audible voices. Quite the opposite of local stereo downmixing in the app or on the shield. This is the only way I know of getting a balanced sound with my pure stereo setup. Nvidia Shield Pro → Sony 65ZD9 → Cambridge Audio Evo 150. In general, many people seem to have problems with stereo downmixing with Plex (general volume, voices barely audible). In addition, at least the flags for the multi-channel audio boost are taken into account when I have the server transcoding, with direct play and local stereo downmix the flags do exactly nothing.
This is a great tip, thanks! I’ve been trying the optical output with some AAC surround tracks (5.1/7.1) but I’m not sure it’s downmixing to stereo. I get these results:
If I disable AC3/DTS the server transcodes to mp3 (my soundbar does not support multi-channel AAC)
If I enable AC3/DTS the server transcodes to AC3 (this may give me more control of audio levels with my sound bar)
Another problem this introduces is it’s now forcing a video transcode as well. Does this happen on your system and is there any way around it?
So turns out the server was forcing a video transcode because I hadn’t manually updated the Plex app to latest. Why the Shield doesn’t auto update apps I don’t understand.
Now when I disable passthrough or set to optical, audio is transcoded to Opus 5.1. Unfortunately not downmixing to AAC stereo.
