Server Version#: 1.21.1.3876
Player Version#: 5.6.1
Platform Version#: 3.3.0
Hi,
My setup is the following:
Openmediavault 5
Intel i5-3570
12gb ddr3 ram
Plex Media Server in docker
The TV is LG 43UH668V, UHD, newest available firmware
When playing a file, audio is stuttering constantly, the video is reproducing normally. Codec is h264, 1080p, bitrate is 13732 kbps. Audio is EAC3 5.1m Bitrate 1024 kbps.
The server is reporting direct play for both video and audio. The TV is connected via WiFi, but the speed is more than enough for the bitrate, and the same happened when connected via ethernet. When I manually try and select the quality of 12Mbps, everything is working normally.
When I try and play the film via a browser on a PC, everything goes smoothly but plex server says that video is direct play and audio is transcoded to AAC.
Does it mean that LG cannot play EAC3? Is there an option to set up the plex app to always transcode just the audio? Or do I have to transcode both video and audio, and do it manually?
Looking at your TV specs, it does not support EAC3. If you have an AV receiver you may look and see if the Plex app has the ability to pass through your audio to your receiver and set the TV to do the same.
Thanks for your answer. I don’t have any audio outputs besides the TV. I see that there are Audio settings in the plex client app, and I have unchecked AC3. Now both audio and video are played seamlessly.
But now, when looking at the plex server, it says that both audio AND video are transcoded, do you know why is that? Maybe because of the subtitle file? Is there a way to transcode only audio stream?
Well, this is strange. Yesterday, I was watching the movie when i wrote that the audio stream was stuttering all the time. I fixed it with disabling AC3 and EAC3 in the Plex settings. Both audio and video were fluid after that. I didn’t finish the movie, and now I played it again (resumed it) and both video and audio are buffering all the time! Even manually setting quality to a lower level doesn’t change it. Disabling subtitles does however, and then everything is working fine. But the movie is in Danish and I can’t watch it without subtitles.
Any ideas why this happened and how to fix it?
EDIT: the subtitles are .srt
EDIT 2: Just checked, if I play the movie from the beginning, everything is OK, if I resume it or jump to any time in the movie, it starts buffering and won’t play smoothly. I’m guessing it’s a bug? Is i5-3570 powerful enough to transcode one 1080p? Transcode meaning, paste subtitles on the video? Without them, the video direct plays.
Some TV’s don’t like PGS subtitles and is why it transcodes, you might remux and rip your movies to remove the PGS subtitles and replace them with SRT instead. I think you can also drop SRT subtitles in the same folder as your movie and if you have your scanner set to look for local files first it may use the SRT instead of the PGS but I am not sure on that.
In my opinion in general TV’s do not have very much power for processing and causes a lot of issues if anything is played but simple video and audio. Once you start introducing subs or any audio more than stereo you start having problems. That is if your only using the TV’s internal speakers and not passing the audio to a AV receiver to process. TV’s say they support EAC3 or DTS but seam to always have issues since the TV has to transcode the audio itself in order to convert it to stereo for your TV Speakers. Most TV’s do not support any of the HD audio formats and need to be also converted even if you have a AV receiver that supports them although some do have a passthrough option for that. I finally gave up on using the TV as my Plex client and with an external device and now use it exclusively for all my apps and no longer use the TV for any streaming.
