curious as to what most of Plex Home Theater / Media Player users are using in regards to audio , passthrough or PCM ? I have always used passthrough , however after reading through the audio settings page I’m wondering if Plex is actually decoding the DTS Master and Dolby TrueHD tracks to PCM as any high end Receiver would ? it seems as if the only difference is no Atmos.
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For Home Theater I used passthrough since my receiver can decode DTS: X and Atmos. However, I’m trying to figure out a way to do passthrough on the new media player. Reason I’m here is to see if support is coming. Without passthrough, Plex has pretty much crippled my expensive home theater audio. Needs passthrough support asap.
This is a very interesting thread and a subject I am very much focused on at the moment. I have been using Plex for a couple of years now and think that the open systems approach, availability of Apps and the UI is the about the best there is available. There is one area, though, where Plex falls desperately short of the competition and it is extremely frustrating for me and my business. As a high-end audio specialist, I need to use the capabilities of the DAC to decode the audio. This is true for all audio formats from 44.1 up to the high res formats of DoP and DTS-MA and Dolby True HD. The audio hardware will do a far better job of decoding these than any PC. In my desperation and because of the recent updates which seem to making it more difficult to pass through, I have starting experimenting with JRiver. It does not have the wonderful interface of Plex and there are nowhere near the number of Apps to make the system truly pervasive but it outperforms Plex for audio quality by a mile. Unless Plex can restore some of the capabilities for tailoring for high-end AV and audio users, then I am going to start working with other products to get what audiophiles are looking for. Come on Plex - there are some of us here who love the UI, flexibility and pervasiveness that you have built into the product. Can you please give us some of the cool audio support that other products offer too?
@tylerrouse said:
For Home Theater I used passthrough since my receiver can decode DTS: X and Atmos. However, I’m trying to figure out a way to do passthrough on the new media player. Reason I’m here is to see if support is coming. Without passthrough, Plex has pretty much crippled my expensive home theater audio. Needs passthrough support asap.
What new media player? Do you mean Plex Media Player (PMP)? It has had passthrough support since day 1. You need to enabled advanced settings and check the codecs your receiver can take. Oh and enable Hardware decoding while you are at it.
@NP-Plex:UK said:
This is a very interesting thread and a subject I am very much focused on at the moment. I have been using Plex for a couple of years now and think that the open systems approach, availability of Apps and the UI is the about the best there is available. There is one area, though, where Plex falls desperately short of the competition and it is extremely frustrating for me and my business. As a high-end audio specialist, I need to use the capabilities of the DAC to decode the audio. This is true for all audio formats from 44.1 up to the high res formats of DoP and DTS-MA and Dolby True HD. The audio hardware will do a far better job of decoding these than any PC. In my desperation and because of the recent updates which seem to making it more difficult to pass through, I have starting experimenting with JRiver. It does not have the wonderful interface of Plex and there are nowhere near the number of Apps to make the system truly pervasive but it outperforms Plex for audio quality by a mile. Unless Plex can restore some of the capabilities for tailoring for high-end AV and audio users, then I am going to start working with other products to get what audiophiles are looking for. Come on Plex - there are some of us here who love the UI, flexibility and pervasiveness that you have built into the product. Can you please give us some of the cool audio support that other products offer too?
If you have a built in soundcard, I doubt this would be an issue. The issue seems to be with with external DAC’s.
I have Plex media player running on a windows 10 machine with a NVIDIA GTX 960 video card. i5 4th gen and I’m using passthrough , although i had some drop outs with Atmos otherwise it works well .
my understanding is that Plex decodes DTS HD Master and Dolby TrueHD and sends it out as PCM just no ATMOS bits , i rather passthrough but i have tried both
@danjames92 said:
If you have a built in soundcard, I doubt this would be an issue. The issue seems to be with with external DAC’s.
Then this is an issue as the external DAC I am experimenting with is a dCS which will have far better clocking and decoding capabilities than any built-in sound card. I have managed to get Plex passing through the bit-perfect digital to an AV receiver with no issues. This works very well. What seems to be missing is the ability to pass through bit-perfect digital through a USB 2.0. This is important because the DAC will determine the clock rate at which the signal is passed through to the DAC (i.e. no reliance on the computer clock which will introduce jitter) and because I can pass over high res DSD over PCM. dCS have written a very good windows driver for the DAC and it performs extremely well with other software. What I am looking for is all the wonderful capabilities of Plex (UI, networking, security, etc) with the ability for me to determine how I want an audio only signal to go through the USB. Does this make sense and, if I am missing something, I would welcome advice.
