Sonos Arc soundbar DTS to AC3 Transcoding not working

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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I have a Sony Bravia android TV with a Sonos Amp connected by eARC. Plex server transcodes audio to suit the TV, but doesn’t seem to know the audio is being passed through to the Sonos which doesn’t support DTS.

I’m manually going through all DTS movies and adding a DD5.1 track with Popcorn MKV audio converter. But it would be nice if Plex server recognized when a Sonos device is connected to a client and automatically transcode at the server. Or a way to force Plex server to transcode all DTS audio to DD or LPCM, or set a specific rule for a particular device.

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Sorry i missed all of this.

It seems i’m experiancing the same issue as yoursef. It certianly worked right after the upgrade but now Atmos is being transcoded to LPCM like yourself.

I haven’t played with it much since writing this so i’ll do some tests when i have time. This isn’t our main watching area so i’ve not played with it much since the upgrade.

Will let you know if I have chance to test.

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Hi George,

I managed to overcome this by installing the latest Shield beta. All working as expected now :slight_smile:

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Scratch that, it definitely was working with the beta but seems to have stopped again. Not sure if the latest Plex Media Server build has caused a problem, may need to try and install an older version!

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For me now “Passthrough” set to optical and AC3 won’t start the movie anymore, just hangs on loading

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I managed to crack the issue for my use-case, see the thread below

Basically it looks like a recent shield update upset the ‘handshake’ between the playback. After I reset the audio back to automatic and then back again to ‘selected’ everything started working.

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Thanks for sharying @tylordurton. I had my suspiscions of handshake related problems but I really don’t use this TV often so i hadn’t got round to pressing buttons.

I just tested mine and it’s working perfectly without having to do the ‘audio mode dance’ so clearly something got restarted and resolved itself since the last time i used this TV. Anyway, if it goes wrong again i’ll try your suggestion.

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Hi @georgejolliffe, glad to see SONOS Arc’s update

Sonos Arc now supports multi-channel LPCM surround sound through an eARC connection.

Did SONOS Beam have the same issue?

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Hi @Eric_Lee_1, No it didn’t because it doesn’t support the high definition audio codecs like the Arc.

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But my SONOS Beam had the same issue that DTS to AC3 transcoding wasn’t working.

Sony 900H – nVIDIA Shield TV 2017 (Plex Media Server) – SONOS Beam

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Oh I see. In your case I’d probably choose “optical” in Plex and disable DTS there.

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OK so here is where I am at -

I am getting DTS tracks 5.1 or 7.1 to passthrough as Multichannel PCM which is fine and expected. However, any Dolby or TRUEHD tracks also get passed as Multichannel PCM. Is this correct? Is there anyway for just the DTS tracks to be passed as PCM and let the TRUEHD and DD tracks to play as intended? For reference, I have the manual audio selection with everything enabled except DTS. I am ok with this if its the only way for DTS to work but I just wanted to make sure.

Thanks for everyone’s help on this. This thread has been a great source of information for this issue.

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same issue here, i’m using hdfury, i can get truehd with passthrough set to hdmi, but dts is convert to pcm 2.0.

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Interesting. I have my passthrough set to HDMI as well but I dont get TRUEHD. I do get TRUEHD with my native TV app which is great but my native tv app also cant do 4k very smoothly which is why I have the Shield. I just feel like im so close to a working solution!

Edit - What I meant was that I get TRUEHD to transcode to DD+ on my native tv app.

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@georgejolliffe Thanks for your reply.
But I can’t find any options to disable DTS in Plex Player settings on Shield TV. What I can get is to change the web player settings in the Shield TV IP’s Plex Media Server web console.

Home theater topology:
Sony TV
|-- HDMI – nVIDIA Shield TV
|-- HDMI – SONOS Beam

Update: I have already solved the transcoding issue of SONOS Beam.
That was really simple:

  1. open Shield TV
  2. open Plex
  3. setting – advanced – channel, just choose to disable it, neither HDMI nor Optical
  4. It would transcode DTS to AC3

Hope this could help someone who faced the same issue about SONOS Beam.

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I have this same problem with a Samsung Q95T, Nvidia Shield Pro 2019, and the Sonos ARC. I can swear that it has been able to play Multichannel PCM 7.1 before but now every DTS track (5.1-7.1, HD or regular) is Stereo PCM 2.0.

Everything is updated to the latest version, My TV is set to eARC Passthrough, Plex is set to Passthrough HDMI, I have tried both Automatic and Manual codec selection on the Shield (making sure DTS and DTS-HD are disabled), restarted everything, done a power cycle on the ARC but still I get Stereo PCM 2.0 on everything DTS related. TrueHD, Atmos, DD+, DD, etc all work perfectly.

If I enable Optical AC3 I do get DD+ 5.1 for everything, but then I miss out on Atmos TrueHD.

I’ve been reading the thread trying to find a solution but unfortunately, nothing I’ve tried in this thread seems to resolve it.

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When I do this, my player hangs on loading for any DTS / EAC3 movie. Didn’t use to do this, don’t know what happened, maybe some update

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Just out of curiosity, what version of Plex is running?

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This has always been the case for me. Enable DTS in any way and Plex barfs and crashes.

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8.10.0.21911 and server 1.21.0.3711