I have the movie on my NAS and I’m playing it on my TV.
The movie is in E-AC-3 audio format. When playing, the Plex dashboard says “Transcode to AAC,” but this only lasts for about 5 seconds, and then the word “Transcode to AAC” changes to “Direct Stream.”
Is this because my TV can play E-AC-3, or because the entire audio track has been transcoded?
It’s a different file because after posting this, I also wanted to share a screenshot of what the first few seconds look like, and then I clicked on a file from the same series. However, both files use the same audio and video codec. Both files transcode the first 5 seconds to AAC, and after that, it says “direct stream.”
Ok, looked at your logs. What you are seeing is the theme music being played first, then the main video. For some reason the theme isn’t playing properly so PMS is transcoding it to a different format. The UI is just slow to change, which is why you see 2 different status. The second status is the correct one for the actual video.
The theme is an mp3 file. The tv app doesn’t want a music file but is asking for an audio only mp4 files so pms is transcoding it to aac, which is what you see in the dashboard. I don’t remember if the tv app always did it this way or if it’s a change.