it might be DTSMA or something and it playing the core DTS track instead because maybe is TV or receiver cannot play DTSMA (obviously this is only a guess since i have not seen his files)
Ah, interesting! Thanks, BigWheel. Hereās his new thread if you wanna help him out:
1 Like
Looks like maybe some help for this is on the horizon, though still pretty far away:
We have plans to resolve this issue, and weāve made some good progress on it. There are some changes required in PMS to support what we need that have been made, but are not yet released. Once these have landed, weāll be looking to make use of in the Android app as soon as we can.
Link to post:
1 Like
So has anyone tried playback of a file with WebVTT subs? Iām wondering if converting files in the library with a tool like the one mentioned above would be a workaround.
Hi everyone !
Plex logs are so hard to understand that I spent almost all night trying to figure out whatās going on with my video being transcoded for no reason.
I wrote a thread in order to understand, and now I know I have the same problem as you !
Whatās driving me crazy is that VLC plays PERFECTLY my video !
The last reply on my thread is this one, so hopefully the issue will be resolved soon :
The link you posted is where you vote for feature requests. There is a staged rollout of the new Android client that should fix the audio transcode and possibly the srt subtitles wonāt burn in.
Plex for Android Announcements
Plex for Android 7.15.0 Available on Google Play and the Amazon App Store. NOTE: We are performing a staged rollout, which means the update may take a day or two before it becomes available. WHATS NEW: [TV] Playback: improved performance with network cache. FIXES: App could crash when starting playback with subtitles. Improve search when handling lots of results. Improve startup management and prevent boot actions from crashing the app on startup. Prevent crash while establishing connectā¦
Link to the 1day-old announcement post: Plex for Android - #304 by marekszulik
I hope the issue will be solved and I hope that this version will be soon posted on Shield TV !!
Itās been broken for over a year, so I wouldnāt get my hopes up, but hey, fingers crossed 
I see nothing in the changelog that hints at fixing this issue. As I am a non-native English speaker myself, although my English are quite good I rely on subtitles to help me understand words that I may miss or difficult to understand accents. That means that I use subtitles almost constantly, so this kind of ābug/featureā in the end makes the Android TV app useless for me as it transcodes everything.
I ended up switching to Kodi and the Plexkodiconnect plugin for it, itās a little complicated to setup correctly but it can direct play everything, even anime with SSA subtitles with heavy styling.
Sorry Plex devs, but you really failed on this one.
Iām having this same issue on my sheild, itās so bloody annoying, I really hope they can fix this
Any news on this? I was just about to buy a Shield, but this is a huge letdown.
Are there any workarounds? Except buying another box compatible with the audio stream.
Does it work with .vvt?
Darbu, there is no workaround yet.
I donāt know if this will work with another box or if it works with .vvt BUT I have to tell you that NVidia Shield TV is, in my opinion, the best TV box. I tried the Xiaomi box and I remembered all the problems the people had to install Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime Video, etc because of DRM.
If you need a box just to use Plex, you can try with other box. In case of other uses, I recommend you to buy a NVidia Shield TV.
Again, this is just my personal opinion !
Just adding that I have the same issues here. Makes it hard to direct stream 4K HDR content. My server is not powerful enough to transcode 4Kā¦
Plex devs, any news on this!?
This is the most annoying issue Iāve ever faced with Plex. After so many year of use, Iām consdering moving to another service. I canāt watch most of my 4K videos because of it. 
those with problems, try changing the plex client hdmi pass through settings and see if that makes a difference.
I saw that one of the latest Plex server updates added additional functionality to the transcoder. Can we expect an Update to the subtitle burn in problem also?
So is this still an issue with Plex?
I just a mouth a DS918+ and my TV supports everything besides DTS, so Plex is encoding audio and the video because of the subtitlesā¦ This is so annoying. I canāt watch anything with subtitlesā¦ There has to be a solution for this, otherwise I donāt know why I should keep using Plex. This doesnāt make any sense at all.
Does Emby has this limitation too?
The only solution I know of is to convert the audio of your files to something your setup can direct play.
Converting from DTS/True-HD/etc to AC3 is what I usually do. But I sometimes forget, or I have eq. both True-HD and AC3 tracks and I forget to switch to the correct oneā¦
My current āsolutionā is to separate HDR and non HDR movies/TV-shows and convert the audio of the HDR rips (to AC3 640kbs) so that most everything direct plays.
Can you recommend any software for converting DTS to AC3 (possibly with a batch function)?
I have a Mac but could run Windows app on my virtual machine.
Personally I would just do it with ffmpeg, but if you need a GUI then maybe something like Popcorn Audio Converter would do the trick. Depending on how fast your drive is it doesnāt take hardly any time at all.
1 Like
