Server Version#: 1.23.6.4881
Player Version#: 2.012
Hi, I’ve had this issue for over 3 years since I was first introduced to plex, but still have not figured out a way to solve it. I used to have the server running on Linux Mint in the past, but recently I changed to Unraid. This issue is present in those two OSes and in a couple others I have tried. TV is a 2015-model Samsung TV, UN48JU6100.
When I play DTS audio movies in my Samsung TV I can barely hear any dialogue at all.
The dialogues are so low, it’s pretty difficult to understand anything that’s being said by the characters, it seems like everyone is whispering inaudible voices all throughout the movies. I have to turn on the subtitles and read them through the whole movie to understand what’s going on in the scenes.
The obvious solution would be to turn up the volume. But I cannot do that. The sound effects and background noise volumes are okay before I turn up the volume. So when I do turn it up to be able to hear the conversation, now the sound effects and background noise are painfully loud, especially in horror and action movies where there’s a lot of people screaming and explosions everywhere. They get extremely loud.
To summarize the issue: The loud volumes are excessively loud and the low volumes are excessively low!
This happens only when I am playing DTS and AAC movies or TV shows.
This NEVER happens with AC3. AC3 works perfectly, never had any issues with it.
A workaround I find is to use ffmpeg to keep the DTS/AAC audio in the first track and create a second track with AC3. But this is not very practical as I have a couple thousand movies + a fairly large amount of TV-show episodes. It’d take months to go through all of them.
This happens only when I am direct playing a movie
If I force it to transcode, I see in the dashboard that it automatically converts from DTS → AC3 (or from AAC → AC3) and now the audio works great. No issues with AC3. This seems to be a second workaround to the issue.
“Audio boost when transcoding” option is set to 300%.
A few questions:
1 - Is there another workaround for this issue besides ffmpeging my whole library or transcoding every movie I want to watch? Maybe there’s an option I need to check/uncheck in the settings, who knows…
2 - The video codecs seem to be fine with my TV. Is there a way to force transcode only of the audio stream and leave the video stream as direct play?
3 - I believe the issue would be on my TV. Maybe it cannot handle DTS or AAC. Is that a fair statement?
4 - If I end up adding a receiver/speakers to my setup, will I be able to use the passthrough feature to have make the receiver do the conversion rather than the Plex App in my TV?
