This might be a very noobish question but I’m very new to audio codecs outside of AAC and AC3. If I want to play audio through Direct Play on Plex without the need to transcode, I need to let the audio pass through the Nvidia Shield through HDMI to a receiver capable of using/decoding that audio format?
So this is my hypothetical setup and I’d love to know if anyone else has had success with a setup like this:
Thanks very much!
@JesseBartlett said:
This might be a very noobish question but I’m very new to audio codecs outside of AAC and AC3. If I want to play audio through Direct Play on Plex without the need to transcode, I need to let the audio pass through the Nvidia Shield through HDMI to a receiver capable of using/decoding that audio format?
Correct (don’t know about the headphones).
My setup: Shield TV → Denon AVR-X4300H → LG OLED 55B7P
The Denon supports Dolby Digital, TrueHD & Atmos. Also dts, dts-HD, dts-HD MA, & dts:X. The Shield will pass through all those to the Denon. The Shield sends AAC to the Denon as PCM. The AAC → PCM decode occurs on the Shield, not on PMS. As a result, any audio sent by the Shield to the Denon is not transcoded by my PMS server.
The only thing I’ve found that the Shield doesn’t support directly or via passthrough is Apple Lossless audio (.m4a music files), which is transcoded to MP3 by PMS.
Caveat: This assumes you’re using a supported container (mp4, mkv, etc) and the video/audio/etc portions are “well behaved.” Basically, if you rip a DVD or Bluray with MakeMkV things will work. Also if you run the rip through Handbrake (or similar) using an appropriate preset. Anything you download from the Internet is hit or miss. There’s a lot of junk out there.
Any yokel can post something for download. Doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Can’t speak to the headphones connected to the TV. I don’t use headphones with my system.
