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I’ve been having a bizarre issue for months now that hasn’t been a big enough deal for me to report before, but I thought I’d do so in case anyone else was having the issue or this has slipped by unnoticed. I can’t see anyone else here with the same issue but I may have missed it. I’m having a strange issue that appears to be linked to particular videos with TrueHD 5.1 audio tracks - when I start to play them, the audio will be garbled, there will be heavy stuttering and the whole thing will usually freeze after 5-10 seconds. However, I can fast forward 30 seconds, then rewind to the beginning, and the audio will play completely fine. This is on my 2019 Shield, connected to a Denon AVR-1400H and in turn an LG C8. Note that this issue is linked to Direct Play, it seems - when I turn off Audio Passthru or mess with the codec settings on the Shield, it will transcode the audio on these files to AAC 5.1 and play as expected. I’ve not had any issues Direct Playing any other codec, including TrueHD 7.1/Atmos. I’ve tried the affected files on Plex Media Player on my PC, there, they Direct Play with no issues, as do the MKV files through VLC Player.
I’ll also note that it doesn’t mean that EVERY TrueHD 5.1 video I have is affected. For example, out of my rips, Dragon Ball Kai episodes play perfectly, but my rips of Tropic Thunder, Iron Man and Samurai Champloo all have this issue. I’m also near-certain that I did not have this issue a year ago on my Shield 2017, as I watched Iron Man in the leadup to the Avengers cinema release. I looked at the MediaInfo for all of these files and didn’t notice any differences between DBKai and the others, except in the former, the audio track was labelled “Surround”, and in the others, they were labelled as “Surround 5.1”, despite all having the same channels. If you need me to test more to narrow down the issue, let me know.
