Hello all, me and others have been asking for multichannel FLAC support and high definition audio support for the NVIDIA Shield’s Plex app for the last three years. Welcome to this year’s annual post (which just happens to be a feature suggestion as well)!
A summary of the issue:
Emby can play back 24-bit/192 kHz without an issue, as well as multichannel FLACs. I can verify the output on my receiver. The LG TV Plex app is able to play back multichannel FLACs as well. However, the NVIDIA Shield Plex app still is not able to (it downgrades to stereo).
Please add support for multichannel FLACs and high definition audio for the Plex app’s music libraries. I had to buy Emby because Plex still refuses to support this, despite the SHIELD adding firmware support for these formats years ago.
I prefer Plex for movies and TV. I also use Plex for audiobooks with excellent plugins. But I also have a large DVD-Audio collection I would like to play back on my Plex app. It would be wonderful if I could play back everything in one place.
Interestingly there had already been a suggestion asking for that exact feature… but apparently you were advertising yours much more successfully, gaining 6x the votes in 8 hours they gathered in 2 years.
Usually this would result in me kindly telling you to please comment/vote in the existing thread in order to avoid cannibalizing the attention… but it seems like it’s too late for that. We’ll probably need to do this the other way in order not to dispose of almost 60 good votes.
Still consider it a reminder for future suggestions… please search before posting duplicates!
Please note that my request also includes support for high resolution audio for the Nvidia SHIELD. The SHIELD gained capability to support up to 32-bit/192 kHz audio in 2018. Many other apps, including Emby, Kodi, and VLC can not only play back multichannel FLAC but also high resolution stereo WAV audio. I am asking for this feature as well.
Here is a short list of common apps on Nvidia’s website and their maximum capabilities in terms of audio resolution:
Sad to see such basic features unreasonably not present in such a big app. I think this is such a crucial feature for those who store and playback their music media library on Plex.
I will be making videos out of my music albums to play them as movies, for years nothing changed; I doubt it will change soon, Instead of fixing they probably will come up with another unnecessary feature.
Just put a static album cover, export same as the album length; merge with audio in mkvtoolnix then put on chapters for the tracks. I am so sad that we have to do this workaround…
Excellent post. I think I found the issue / reason for this Plex / Nvidia high resolution multichannel issue. It’s the HDMI 2.0 on the NVIDIA Shield TV Pro. When you want high res uncompressed multichannel audio you need HDMI 2.1 which can handle eARC.
So assume one has an high end TV like LG’s C2 with HDMI 2.1 and eARC and you connect it to a high end AVR with HDMI 2.1 and eARC. So far so good.
You then connect the NVIDIA Shield TV Pro with HDMI 2.0 without eARC capabilities to your AVR or TV and there you will find your issue. The source (Nvidia with HDMI 2.0, without eARC) can’t handle high resolution uncompressed multichannel audio so the audio will be compressed.
HDMI 2.1 with eARC can deliver up to 32 channels of audio, including eight-channel, 24bit/192kHz uncompressed data streams at speeds of up to 38Mbps.
This also explains why there is no issue when u use the Plex client directly on the LG C2 because you avoid the HDMI 2.0 bottleneck.
We need to pray that Nvidia will release a new Shield TV Pro in the near future with HDMI 2.1 that has eARC support, I think this is the only way to resolve this issue.
The signal flow is simply Shield → AVR. There is no need for ARC in this use case. If you plug in the Shield into your TV first, and then go from TV to AVR or soundbar, that’s a matter between the TV and the AVR/soundbar. This connection method is not recommendable, btw.
There is no documentation of the Shield even supporting the basic type of ARC.
Yep, it’s annoying to have to switch to Kodi everytime I want to listen to a surround flac album.
The silly thing is, Plex perfectly supports 5.1 FLAC if it’s in a video container like MKV, but not the audio files on their own. so At the moment my surround music is split into two separate libraries and two separate apps, one for flac files, and one for MKVs from dvd/bd music rips that arent yet cut into separate tracks or are in DTS/Dolby formats
I’m using a Shield 2019 directly into an Anthem MRX720 receiver and surround flac playback via plex only shows PCM 2.0. but in Kodi the same files come up as Multichannel properly, and even the craziest 24/192 7.1 flac files are played back properly.
+100 for this. There have been many threads on this topic that unfortunately have been closed over time. We need 5.1 FLAC music support for the Shield and other Android players! Please make this happen Plex. The industry is now moving towards Atmos music, 5.1 music should have been a baseline feature years ago.
Just realized this doesn’t work on my shield tv pro luckily still within 30 day return window so I’ll do that and order apple tv 4k if u say that works. I’ll keep checking back here to see if it gets added and maybe consider buying it again then
Do keep in mind that while the Apple TV is great, it too has flaws. It cannot bitstream audio, so it cannot do TrueHD Atmos or DTS:X, and you can’t sideload apps, so there’s no SmartTubeNext. I own both for this reason.
Yes, we know. And like I said above, you don’t need to own both. The SHIELD can play multichannel FLAC if you use Emby. All you need is the SHIELD.
But it would be nice if Plex supported this feature as well. The LGTV Plex app supports it, so it’s not like the Plex team has no idea this feature exists…it just needs to come to Android TV devices.
I wish this thread expanded multi-channel FLAC to multi-channel audio-only formats. Then I would vote for it.
Pass-though to an AVR capable of decoding DTS-HDMA surround only files (MKA, DTS, DTSHDMA, etc.) should be brain-dead easy; My WIndows 7 Media Centre could do it.
Emby can do it - and so can spin-offs like Jelly-Fin.
luckily still within 30 day return window so I’ll do that and order apple tv 4k if u say that works. I’ll keep checking back here to see if it gets added and maybe consider buying it again then 
