I recently bought the Shield TV and set up Plex. Unfortunately, I am unable to play anything decently. Most of my videos have ac3 audio, and the Shield refuses to Direct Play these videos when Direct Play is set to ‘auto’. It transcodes these videos, with the reason “ac3 not available on this device”. When I set Direct Play to Forced, the video is direct playing, but I don’t have any audio.
The Shield is directly connected to my Samsung ES8000 TV over HDMI. No receiver, no soundbar (although I tried using my Sonos playbar over optical, but this gives the same result as using the TV speakers).
I tried using both my PMS on my NAS (Synology), as well as using the internal Shield PMS. Both seem to be too weak to do proper transcoding, but regardless, they should not be transcoding in the first place.
The built-in Plex app on my Samsung TV does work properly (also using the PMS on my Synology). Here all videos with ac3 are direct playing, without issues, and without transcoding. So I would assume my TV IS capable of playing ac3, as opposed to what Plex on the Shield TV claims.
Also Kodi on the Shield can play all videos with ac3 without issues. So by deduction, the problem should be in the Plex app for the Shield.
I’ve been browsing the internet looking for answer for the past 3 days, but haven’t been able to find any answer. I hope someone here can help me.
My understanding is the Shield doesn’t have the license to decode dolby digital. If you think your TV support dolby digital on its HDMI port, you need to activate audio passthrough in plex client advance settings. However, it’s not because your tv build in client support dolby digital that it will be supported on the hdmi inputs. It depends how Samsung licensed it. For example, my TV support dolby digital from its ATSC tuner, but doesn’t support it from its HDMI input.
Why the Shield doesn’t support dolby digital? I guess nvidia did not want to add the license cost over the already pricy tag and they probably assumed that most of us already have an av receiver.
Kodi can play it because it has transcoding capability build in the client. In plex, the transcoding is done by the server.
For you sound bar, did you try to activate audio passthrough? With audio passthrough activated, it should work. In firmware 3.x, you setup did not work, however it should be fixed in firmware 5.x
The question is, how come, that the sound plays on Kodi with passthrough enabled and does NOT play in Plex with passthrough enabled on the same equipment. I’d say - it is Plex fault all the way.
I had the same Issue. To solve it, just got to nvidia shield settings, and set audio surround to automatic.
i know this thread is old, but maybe the next user has the same
Tip from Cilow is still the solution.
Staff was telling me my tv couldn’t handle AC-3 while it did work direct playing in tizen app on the same samsung tv and in kodi… (Why transcoding and burning on Shield?) But there is still a bug that nowadays the shield is reporting in tautulli and web client that audio was not being transcoded although information overlay said it was (as you can read in that topic)
But glad you found a real solution so i’m not transcoding anymore (which also solves the burning of subtitles if audio has to be transcoded… also a long long known issue)
Where is the audio surround option?
Even with audio passthrough, Plex keeps saying that the Shield does not support E-AC-3 and transcodes.
It plays fine with Kodi without any transcoding…
Edit: my bad, found it in the Android settings.
However, mine was already set to Auto surround sound so that doesn’t solve the issue for me…
