I was playing around with a new Chromecast with Google TV and ran into some weird and unexpected behaviors. When I tried to play back a 4K video file with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision it was almost successful but I ran into a problem that the Chromecast with Google TV can’t passthrough lossless audio codecs.
After finding that out I ran into another weird problem. When the audio needs transcoding and the video is made Direct Steam instead of Direct Play it loses Dolby Vision. It switched my TV from Dolby Vision to HDR instead. This didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me. If there is a technical reason I would love to know it.
Then another weird aspect was that if I enabled PGS subtitles while the video track was Direct Streaming it forced the server to burn the subtitles in, even though PGS subtitles were supported and worked with Direct Play. Which caused a weird cascade of issues where if I tried to use a lossless audio codec then suddenly Plex would have to transcode every part of the movie.
I ran into a few different problems within just a few minutes of playing with the device and just wanted to see if someone was able to explain why these happen or if they were unintended bugs and I should be waiting for a fix.
So to reiterate the parts that I don’t understand
- Why does Plex switch from Dolby Vision to HDR10 when Direct Streaming?
- Why are PGS subtitles burned in while direct streaming?
- Also is there a way to tell when Plex fails to output DTS-HD MA and falls back to the lossy core? As this would have made diagnosing easier.