just commenting for the sake of it, i know plex devs wont do anything and they dont care about feedback like this - we are all just collectively wasting our times writing these messages out
but yes i am in a similar situation where i can run the kodi app with plex for kodi (pannal dev) and everything works for flac.
when i run the plex native app for android TV, including trying out the beta - flac does not work. flac will be transcoded and additionally it will force transcoding onto the video.
kodi with plex for kodi does none of this. it just direct plays. plex devs are at fault in this.
It’s almost 6 months later and I’ve been patient enough. I’m now looking for a new media centre that will play all audio formats including audio surround files.
I was a bit dissapointed, that my music files, in 7.1 atmos only plays in stereo on NVIDIA Shield pro.
VLC, can do it, but the PLEX interface and user experience, is so much better.
Yes, it’s very disappointing, and has been that way for quite some time now.
I’ve expressed my disappointment and frustration on these forums on a number of occasions now with no feedback received from the dev team and no suggestion of a resolution.
I can only conclude that this is a limitation of the core playback components that are fundamental to the current functionality of PMS. Unless those core components are updated by their developer there is nothing the Plex team could do to force that functionality, besides switching to a different core, which would come with a whole bunch of other issues.
I can, however, offer a simple workaround: VLC. You can connect directly to your server and play your FLAC files in beautiful multichannel surround. It’s not pretty but, again, it works.
It appears somebody created a duplicate suggestion for this feature. While we usually keep the standing suggestion, they seem to have been advertising their suggestion quite successfully… gaining almost 60 votes in 8 hours (vs. 9 votes in this thread).
I would therefore ask you to please transfer your votes into the new suggestion while I close this thread as a duplicate (please don’t forget to reclaim the votes from this thread!!).
My apologies for the inconvenience! [mod-edit: merged to maintain votes]
I ran into this today not with FLAC, but with PCM (WAV) audio.
I rip Japanese Blu-rays of anime and mux in subtitles, so I can watch them. Many shows aren’t available in the US or at the quality of Japanese releases, so I import quite often.
Thing is, Japanese releases often come with 24-bit 48kHz PCM audio. While that NVIDIA page doesn’t note anything about 48kHz, I would assume it’s also not supported as the conversion goes to 16-bit audio:
What’s weird is while multichannel FLAC doesn’t support more than 24-bit 48 kHz, stereo FLAC does, and most of my Japanese discs are stereo PCM, not multichannel.
Why is Plex lagging behind in this regard? Is it a really hard feature to implement? I’d like some insight.
Also, this issue is killing the bass and the clarity of the audio. That’s why I looked it up in the first place. I don’t mind getting lower-quality PCM as long as it sounds good enough. My issue is that it completely removes the bass such that the 192kbps AC3 track sounds better because it has bass and dialog is separated from whatever that mess is.
