I’m my living room (where PMP is being used) I have a home cinema setup with 5.1 sound.
How will I make the new app output to 5.1 now?
I saw in a thread here that it follows the windows sound settings, but that’s not good because I’m currently using an optical sound cable (my relatively old receiver only supports that) and in Windows settings I’m forced to select 2.0 because windows doesn’t use ac3/dts (those are the only formats that an optical cable can transmit in 5.1).
In PMP, I can select that I have an optical cable, and it will transcode as appropriate and output 5.1 when my source has it. Now what will I do?
Similarly, my receiver handles only low bitrate DTS otherwise the sound lags behind. PMP solved this by letting me select that my receiver didn’t support DTS (so it transcoded DTS to AC3). Now what?
I can endorse this new concept, but the sound settings must be carried over to the web layout in that case.
Same goes for display settings really. Like hz switching. I’m losing that too, and it should just be a question of putting a new checkbox on the web layout right?
While I understand that you want to make it clear for all users that this is not meant for a TV, the player remains the same right? If so, why not expose those settings also in the web layout? They could be hidden behind advanced settings for example, and grayed out in an actual web browser (and hence also serve as a little advertisement for the new client, for example just put a text saying “only available in the desktop app”).
We thought hard about your questions while designing the app’s feature set. Ultimately we landed on a constrained feature set that is easier to support 100%. It gets dizzying to support various settings and their individual and combined side effects.
I can promise we’ll continue to reevaluate our features against user needs. It sounds “company-ish” but it’s the straight answer. I’m listening. If folks want I’ll advocate as well.
i am not sure i understand, so what your saying is that i will never be able to have the new Plex app play in Dolby or any other format through my receiver, since i can no longer select those as options for the player to recognize?
Can you at least tell us what the difficulty is exactly? To remove such fundamental feature of a media player (among others such as increasing the buffer size, without which I’m unable to use the new app as it stutters every second as the drive reads the date, but I digress), one would expect the challenge in supporting the feature to be extraordinary.
I just can’t wrap my head around these decisions. Was it a staff issue? Did you decide to remove this feature rather than replace the person maintaining it with someone who can still do it?
This mentality hurts all of the users who have more advanced setups, typically those who have been using Plex for a very long time. This is worse than the time y’all got rid of the settings for Direct Play/Direct Stream.
I for one won’t be able to use the new player on any of my systems due to the lack of sound output selection. This new setup totally hoses all the users who have multiple sound interfaces, and dedicate the non-default interface to Plex.
For example, my windows based media machine in my bedroom uses a TEAC UD-501 DAC for Plex, and the default windows sound interface for everything else. My Mac based media setup in my office uses dedicated non-default channels on my Behringer XR-18 for Plex, so levels can be tweaked and routed to my stack of headphone amps.
So, now I have to either set the DAC/Mixer as default and get all the crap system sounds too… or stick with the old/deprecated application. And that just sucks.
But it doesn’t change the fact that it still is a hack. And the core of the matter is that they removed a critical configuration dialogue which was only accessible via TV mode, without adding a replacement.
It’s a big pitty that the new Plex for Windows application is following the Windows Sound settings. I have huge issues to convince Windows 10 to output 5.1 AC-3 audio to my TV. The EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) coming from my TV is not properly read by Windows. So Windows thinks it can only output stereo. But I have a Sonos 5.1 setup that can handle 5.1 AC-3 audio attached to my TV (Audio passthrough).
HTPC --HDMI–> TV --SPDIF–>Sonos
I previously had it working, but last month I upgraded my HTPC with a fresh install and now it doesn’t work anymore.
I’m still figuring out how to tell windows it can output 5.1 AC-3 audio. The only thing that currently outputs AC-3 audio is Plex Media Player with the help of the Audio Passthrough setting…
So dear Plex employees, either focus on Intel (graphics-dept.) and Windows to make the audio options more flexible in the windows settings, of make it in your own software. Because otherwise a huge amount of Plexians won’t be able to enjoy 5.1 audio anymore.
The internet is full of people that aren’t able to output 5.1 audio over HDMI to their TV.
