A Roku 2 wasn’t compatible with HEVC hence why I upgraded to the Premiere’s. Plex would just freeze. Also if the audio was AAC then Plex would also transcode as Roku’s doesn’t support that either. Roku’s are a lot more flexible nowadays. In my opinion better than Fire Stick as they don’t support DTS in any way. Well last time I checked anyway.
Use your PC as a server and get a Roku Express+. That’s how I set my parent’s up and they have no problems…and they run 2 Roku Express+'s
Rgds
CCF
Before quarantine I used Plex to rip DVDs & Blu-rays to watch in the rooms that don’t have a disc player, and host some obscure things I have that aren’t available on any of the streaming platforms. The Roku 2 I got years ago & it did the job, I had no interest in a “Real” server, I have 6 NASs, all together they use as much power than a single PC server. Plus they give redundancy. Now with quarantine & me watching a lot of TV I’ve ripped 50% of my movies, & been given stuff to watch from friends, I now have a PC server, though an old 2011 Quad-core with a low power profile, so it can handle some transcoding, but I’d still rather not. The Roku works fine, the Xbox in the other room has issues but works alright, the smart TV in the other room works fine, the PS4 in the other room works fine, the Firestick is annoying but works fine & my Android TV box works great. As much love as you are giving Roku the fact it doesn’t support AAC (which I find hard to believe but audio transcoding might just be something I didn’t notice) is a HUGE negative. I’ve never been a big fan of AAC, but it did win the format race & is now the standard lossy compression. Not supporting that is like saying you don’t support SRT & only support all the others. You loose over ½ of the available market
Hello again
I totally get your viewpoint regarding the available market. I spent hours trying to find the best device for my needs. Roku won as it supported Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Prime and Plex…Just waiting for Britbox to come to Roku and I’m a completely happy bunny!
All the devices that you are using are compatible with H264 and AC3. They have to be if they have optical disc drives in them (DVD and /or BluRay discs have to have AC3 as their default audio track as not everybody uses DTS or any HD audio). Also as for as I’m aware online video streaming companies now use E-AC3 (DD+) more now instead of AC3 so AAC can’t be the industry standard. Especially if some devices don’t support AAC.
I do however get that you want to make sure you have all bases covered across all your devices.
Plex will however transcode the audio streams from AAC to AC3 if the streaming device doesn’t support AAC. Hence maybe why you are having problems with a couple of your devices. This is why I only use either AC3 and/or DTS as I only use Roku’s. Horses for courses.
However you shouldn’t notice much processor usage if the server needs to transcode the audio.
As for AAC winning a format race there was in my opinion no real competition. It is what Apple chose for their iTunes shop so was therefore forced upon the Apple buying public. It just crossed over to movie audio as well. They even created the lossless format ALAC as they didn’t want to use FLAC for their lossless music container . DRM and all that…To force a file standard on a fee paying public is wrong… Every other online music store offers mp3 and FLAC as well as AAC and ALAC. ALL your devices will work with AC3 and H264 without any transcoding from your PC.
If I acquire media with AAC sound I convert it to AC3 with FFMPEG. Yes it does make the file size slightly bigger but is more compatible with all devices.
And I use .srt for my subs as it is compatible with my Roku… But it is also compatible with everything else.
I hope this doesn’t come across as argumentative…It is not my intention. Just my way of thinking…
Again Kind Regards
CCF
AAC is vastly superior in compression, if the file size is slightly bigger then your sound quality is lower. It’s more extreme the lower it goes, but in general for the same sound quality AC3 requires twice the bitrate. The only device that does not support AAC is Roku, everything else does just fine. & I just checked & my Roku 2 is currently Direct Playing AAC audio. I tried it with 4 different titles. So while they all may work with AC3, though I doubt the Smart TV with a built-in Plex App does, but it does mp4 H264/265 with AAC no problem, that’s like keeping all your pictures in BMP instead of PNG.
UPDATE: Roku does not support AAC in more than 2 channels. The things I was checking were stereo TV episodes
The Android version went for a revamp of the UI, not sure if it was displaying this information before but it’s not showing it now. Tested on both Android phone and TV. Since the web version does show it, it’s either a bug or a feature missing.
Hasn’t been implemented yet and we won’t know when/if it will until it appears.
This was also mentioned by tom80H in the other post you made about this.
Subscribe to the announcement thread for Android, Plex for Android, to get notifications when there is a new version and what has been add/changed/fixed. At the bottom of the thread after the very last post change the drop down that says normal to watching and you’ll get a notification when a new post has been made there.
-Shark2k
Curious how this hasn’t been implemented on all clients yet after more than 6 years. The closes we have is being able to see it in the Plex web client. My nVidia shield still just shows the codec name.
Same here on Shield. I have no title for the subtitles so I don’t know the track I have to use… if transcode is needed, you have to wait 10s between each choice :-/
All players around the world give this information ^^ so… please, add this!
+1 for adding track names to plex clients!
You need to click on “English (AAC Stereo)” to see the dropdown and it will show in the dropdown.
It’s only shown during the selection of the audio/subtitle.
-Shark2k
What version of the server are you on?
I can’t tell which server update included the update to the local web app to include this feature but that could be a possibility.
I’m guessing you are using the hosted version but can’t tell from your screenshots.
The web app at plex.tv is always the latest version.
What container are you using for files?
I can confirm that this does in fact work as I see it working for me.
I just took that screenshot from my local web app.
I use MKV containers and make sure the name field is the info I want to display.
-Shark2k
I use mp4 as primary vice mkv (although I have plenty of movies in that format).
I have the latest server & web downloads. My screenshots were from an hour ago with the latest server download.
By the way, I’m looking for plex to display my audio descriptions, not subtitle descriptions. It’s for use in workout videos that I make with multiple audio tracks, e.g. rock, new age, classical, etc.
My audio descriptions (using ffmpeg and “title”) work fine in VLC. Just can’t get the same titles to display in plex.
I don’t use MP4, I remux everything to MKV if I have it in MP4 and then I use MKVToolNix or the mkvpropedit from that to update the track names for overall title, video name, audio name and subtitle name.
For MP4, I really can’t help you out with that as I don’t use that container so I’m not really familiar with ways to update the metadata info. I’m also not sure which field in the metadata is being used by Plex to pull that info from an MP4 file.
Something else I just thought of is go to your server settings and then go to the Agents section. Go to Shows and then select TheTVDB (I’m guessing that’s the one you are using) and make sure that “Local Media Assets (TV)” is selected and under “TheTVDB” as I believe that probably needs to be on for Plex to pull that info. Be aware though that having that checked, if you have bad metadata within your MP4, you can get poor results when you add new media. After you do that you will have to analyze the file again to see if it picks it up.
If that doesn’t work, hopefully somebody more familiar with MP4 will chime in here to help you out.
Of course, another option is you can mux your file to an MKV container with ffmpeg and then update the name field using MKVToolNix and use that. A simple ffmpeg -i {inputFile.mp4} -map 0:v:0 -c:v copy -map 0:a -c:a copy {output.mkv} will simply copy all the tracks to an MKV (you can add -map 0:s -c:s copy before the {output.mkv} if you have subtitles to copy over as well).
-Shark2k
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve previously tried the mkv route, but didn’t work either. But you may be onto something–I’m thinking the problem is in my plex settings vice a problem with the mp4 or mkv files. I’ll work through that, even though I had already tried the “local media assets” setting too.
UGH…quite frustrating, particularly when VLC works like a champ, but not on my remote sites where I need to use PLEX.
As I mentioned, I tried the mkv route before–but was several months ago when I was using the js script adapted for this purpose. Had no success. But went ahead and gave it another shot today on this server, and it worked! One thing, recoding into mkv stripped my titles from the mp4, but just reloaded using ffmpeg again.
So it must be something with mp4 files.
Thanks. Guess I’ll switch to mkv for the workout videos unless someone here has a better idea for mp4.
Thanks again!!
Just noticed last night my Shield client now displays the names of the audio tracks, which is a massive step forward and I am surprised it’s not being talked about here.
Is there any chance of the same happening for subtitle tracks?
Probably because that’s part of release 8.12 of the Android client which is currently in beta (therefore not yet installed with most users).
Plex will display the title of a stream… if one is set. So it could be missing as additional details if your stream has no title tag (which might apply to external subs)
I name my subs when I do the audio streams, I don’t have any external subs just the embedded PSG ones, on the web interface I can see their names but in the Shield client that name is not filtering through but it is for audio (don’t get me wrong this is a major update).
