Hey, thanks for making something that allows me to improve my family’s quality of media (with remuxes), and give them a bit of respite from all those subscriptions.
I have a large server and focus mostly on remuxes of discs that I purchase, because I want better quality than anything anyone else can provide, but audio is a sticking point - my hi-fi system does not handle trueHD or DTS-MA audio that well. To work around the buggyness, I force my streaming device to output PCM, which works reliably, but my streaming device can’t always decode the codec, meaning Plex has to transcode it, and it usually does to Opus.
I understand opus is rather efficient, but I want proper lossless if I’m going to all this effort. Since y’all recently added the ability choose to transcode to HEVC (which works great btw), and y’all are in the process of upgrading your ffmpeg binaries, can you also add the option for plex to prefer LPCM over Opus?
Doing this would probably only be manageable in the local network.
Keep in mind that a PCM 5.1 surround sound stream with 48 kHz SR and 24 bits resolution will amount to 6,912 kbps bitrate.
For a 7.1 stream you are going up to 9,216 kbps. (This is what you can usually find in your regular DTS HD-MA audio stream.) That is almost 10 mbps for audio alone.
So when determining bitrate requirements, this value would either be needed to be added to the video bandwidth or (if there is a bitrate restriction) is needed to be deducted from the available bitrate, leaving less for the picture and thus causing video quality degradation.
But I agree with you that this is desirable for maximum quality in the home cinema.
My arguement boils down to this: there’s 2 reasons to transcode audio (or anything in general), compatibility and bandwidth. Opus is great for bandwidth, but we can do better for clients who are transcoding for compatibility reasons.
