Plex app on Vizio M65-E0 selecting commentary track on How to Train Your Dragon 4k, Snatch 1080 BluRay

General Discussions
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Hello,

Most of my movies play perfectly, but I have two films that refuse to play anything but the commentary track on my Plex app for Vizio:
How to Train Your Dragon 4k, with DTS-HD MA 7.1
Snatch 1080p Blu Ray, with DTS-HD MA Surround 5.1

What I’ve tried so far:

  • Manually select 7.1 or 5.1 audio track. This does not help; when I hit “info” on the TV, it shows that it is playing the stereo track. But when I go to track selection in Plex, it shows that I have selected the 7.1 track (or the 5.1 track).

What I think is happening:
Both of these films have an extra 5.1 track, and this may be a 5.1 commentary track. Somewhere between my TV and my soundbar the 7.1 track is incompatible, so Plex falls through to the 5.1. But something is wrong and there is a bug with Plex not being able to decide which 5.1 track to play, so it falls through to the stereo track.

I’m in the process of removing the 5.1 and stereo commentary tracks from the MKV to see if this fixes the problem. However, this doesn’t make me happy, since I may want to listen to the 5.1 commentary at some point. Prefer if Plex properly recognized all audio tracks, and obeyed my will as to which track to play.

It’s not clear from the TV UI what is happening, or why the plex app is silently selecting a different audio track than I have specified. Are there playback logs I can look at?

Hardware:
Plex Server 1.22.3.4392 on Asustor NAS
Vizio M65-e0 running the Plex app
Samsung HW-Q70R (supports Atmos, DTS:X). I’m pretty sure the TV passes through audio directly to the soundbar, but it’s nearly impossible to tell given poor UIs between TV and soundbar.

On the TV Plex app, I have selected direct passthrough for both audio and video where possible.

Any help here is much appreciated. Is this a bug in the Plex UI?

Thanks,
James

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This can happen if you have DTS enabled in settings. Likely the TV isn’t passing the audio through to the soundbar or (possible, but perhaps unlikely) it’s choosing to pass the other audio track.

Basically, if there are multiple audio tracks and the app knows that the TV can direct play the first one, then we’ll allow direct play. With DTS enabled, this tells the app that regardless of what the app thinks the TV supports that we should assume it supports DTS. This allows direct play, but that puts it in the hands of the TV, which may decide it can’t handle some tracks and chose the first track it decides it can.

Disabling that setting will cause it to transcode the audio track and fix the issue. I’m pretty sure the model you have doesn’t support DTS natively (I’d need to know the chipset value from Settings->About to be certain), and so far, I haven’t heard of anyone getting pass through to work with similar models.

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