Plex Dashboard - now playing - question about transcoding

General Discussions Plex Features
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The screenshot is from the Plex Dashboard showing a video playing on a Roku express stick which is plugged directly into a TV.

Plex

I would think the TV/Roku is capable of playing the h264 video stream directly without transcoding.

I also would think Plex would be transcoding the 5.1 audio to stereo since it’s a TV with two speakers.

My question is:

  1. Why isn’t it direct playing the video and instead transcoding it? What is is transcoding to?
  2. Is plex transcoding the 5.1 audio to 2 channels - or is the TV doing some work there?
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The main reason this video is transcoding is the Vobsub (DVD) subtitles. Rokus cannot direct play image based subtitles, so the Plex server has to transcode to “burn” them in.

There are some settings you can change in the Roku to allow the AC3 audio to direct play or stream if the TV is capable (most TV’s are able to, and do the conversion) Try and find a “srt” subtitle for the video, and add the file to the folder the movie is in. I have pretty good luck with https://subscene.com/subtitles for English subtitles.

This support doc should have the info you need for adding local subtitle files:

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