Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 (Optical passthrough) - EAC3 stutters

Plex Players
,
1

I found a few other topics on this, but nothing new.

My Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 is both my plex server and client. When watching 4k content, if the audio codec is EAC3, the video stutters and is slow to load. If it is AC3 it is smooth as butter.

My audio output is set to optical passthrough, so EAC3 gets transcoded to AC3 correctly. Transcoding the audio really shouldn’t be that much of an issue that it causes the video to stutter.

Has anyone found a solution to this at all anywhere? (I’ve done a trawl through reddit and here, nothing useful)

Workarounds I’ve seen/thought of:

  • Convert my library to AC3 (isn’t part of the whole point of plex to not care about codecs though?)
  • Use a different client and a plugin.

Server Version#: latest
Player Version#: latest

2

I think this might be the issue:

3

This is only an issue with 4k files, I’m guessing the nvidia shield pro box has sufficient performance to overcome the transcoding issue when copying a 1080p stream. (Although it often takes a while to start the stream, and has poor scrubbing performance)