Infuse app better than Plex on Apple TV 4K?

I was told on another forum by a guy that sounds credible that the Plex app on the Apple TV 4K will not stream lossless TrueHD/DTS HD but the Infuse App will.

This sounds like a limitation of the Plex app… is this true? Is this being addressed?

Nope.

Edited to update for dts.

Both apps decode TrueHD & dts to PCM. The audio is converted on the AppleTV, so Plex Media Server reports it as Direct Play. Apple does not permit TrueHD or dts passthrough. PCM is lossless, so there is no quality loss. However, any ATMOS and dts:X information is lost in the process.

See Infuse Forum Post and Infuse FAQ.

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Thanks!

Does Apple TV pass HDR10/DolbyVision from Plex?

Yes for the AppleTV 4K. See Tech Specs. No for the HD and earlier models.

There is a caveat for Dolby Vision (DV).

Downloading a DV demo file from Sony, LG, etc is easy (ex: 4KMedia.org). Getting a DV version of Guardians of the Galaxy, not so much.

Ripping a Blu-ray with Dolby Vision to play in Plex is not straightforward. It has to do with the version of Dolby Vision on the disc vs what is supported by the AppleTV, Nvidia Shield, etc. A compounding factor is that the MKV container does not yet formally support Dolby Vision. The MP4 container does, but does not support lossless audio such as TrueHD & dts-HD MA.

There is a long, detailed thread in the Nvidia Shield / Android TV section covering this. I’ll add the link if I can find it.

The short answer is that it isn’t quite there yet. The good news is that people are working on it, including some from Plex.

I’m going to stop, because that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge on the subject, and I’ve probably mis-stated a couple of things.

I’ll let others fill in the details and point out anything I got wrong.

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Infuse has better cache handling than Plex, so if you play large files, you might want to consider it. Infuse caches to disk and will pretty much download the entire file to disc as fast as the network provides so long you have enough disc space.

Where does it cache it to?

To the Apple TV 32/64 gig disc. Provided you have enough space, it will cache the entire movie

MKV does actually formally support Dolby Vision, as of June 18 :wink: However, there is nothing that actually creates files to this specification at present

Thanks for the update!

No worries! :slight_smile:

As of today MakeMKV 1.15.2 supports the new DV MKV spec.

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Well, that wasn’t available 9 hours ago when I posted :sweat_smile:

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Too bad it isn’t retroactive :slight_smile:

my TV not have 4k unfortunately!!

This is good info, thanks.

What is the reason Atmos is lost here? It seems the same is true for EAC3-5.1 with Plex. And since this IS working (ie DD+ with Atmos) on Netflix and other apps it seems it must be something related to the plex player?

Plex on the AppleTV 4K will pass EAC3 + Atmos to equipment that supports the format.

So I bought the ATV4K and it eats my HDR10 movies with ease as well as DTS (TV +ARC couldn’t handle DTS and my Roku couldn’t handle HDR10/DolbyVision).

I tried playing the only DV movie I had (Top Gun) and it buffered so badly it was unwatchable. Infuse showed ZERO improvement (I thought it was supposed to have better buffering capabilities?)

I am loving the Infuse app. Dolby Vision LG Demo files with the Plex client on my AppleTV 4K don’t play correctly, regardless of whether or not they are in MP4 or MKV containers. But Infuse plays them without issue. It’s a great client.

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