Plex windows player cannot handle some EAC3 5.1 audio properly

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Server Version#: 1.31.0.6654-02189b09f
Player Version#: Version 1.64.2.3546-5107ec40

It’s a weird issue. I recently downloaded a TV show which has 30 episodes. The audio tracks of them are EAC3 5.1 or AAC stereo.

When I play some episodes I found the video and audio are quite choppy. The video bitrate is 15M only but the server bandwidth shows 160Mbps average. After some debugging, I found it’s because of the EAC3 5.1 audio. If I switch to AAC, everything is normal. But not all the episodes have problem, some of them can be played with EAC3 5.1 audio without problem. And if I use VLC player, all episodes are good with EAC3 5.1 audio.

Then I tried the problematic episodes on ipad and nvidia shield with plex client. The same problem happened on ipad while there is no issue on Shield. I think the difference is both windows and ipad need to convert EAC3 5.1 to stereo while Shield just passthrough the audio to AV receiver.

So I think plex windows player/ ipad player may not be able to handle some EAC3 5.1 audio properly. But I don’t know why and how to debug it.

Any clue?

Regards,

2

On the windows player at least you can set it to pass-though EAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus) in Player settings. You need to manually select a device to the right thing and the kind to HDMI. This image is for on Mac but windows version should have similar

Plex
Plex838×597 82.1 KB

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Yeah. But I don’t have any external device when play with windows or ipad.

4

Can you post client logs when playing one of these files in Plex for Windows?

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