I have noticed a possible bug. If I have videos with high bitrate and the default audio track is truehd, plex fails to play it. It can sometimes direct stream if the player supports that bitrate and truehd, but if it has to transcode, it doesn’t even try. It just fails. I’ve added a second eac audio track and it still fails. If I make the eac audio track preferred and leave truehd as not preferred, plex can transcode with no issues. It does not have this problem with smaller (lower bitrate) videos. This drove me nuts for a while until I found the work around. Just passing it along in case someone else has the same issue with truehd audio.
Plex cannot transcode truehd.
Update: If your client says it supports truehd, Plex will pass the truehd track as-is. It’s then up to the client to decide what to do.
It will play fine if on my firetv with passthrough to my stereo. The server just errors if I try to play it on anything that does need transcode. It’s a server problem, not on the player end.
What client is it erroring on? Not all clients support passthrough of truehd.
I can let my android phone direct play it and it’s fine, then when I turn off direct play so the server has to transcode, it fails. The server just can’t seem to transcode the file if it’s high bitrate and truehd. The log shows that the transcoder just stops. I don’t remember the exact error and I fixed all my files. 
In addition to the client type & version, which Plex Media Server version?
Depending on the client, PMS may try to encode TrueHD to EAC3. Some PMS 1.41.7 builds had a bug preventing such, and playback would fail. If you’re on PMS 1.41.7 you should update to the current public release anyway, as that release has other bugs that are fixed in the current release.
Also, try this:
- Stop Plex Media Server
- Navigate to the Codecs folder in the Plex Data Folder.
- Move the EasyAudioEncoder folder outside of the Plex Data Folder (drag it to the desktop, downloads, etc.)..
- Start Plex Media Server.
- Give Plex 2 - 3 minutes to start, then try and transcode TrueHD.
PMS uses the Easy Audio Encoder to transcode TrueHD. It will download a new version the next time it needs to transcode TrueHD.
I actually tried all that. It didn’t help. The only solution was to just swap the default audio track. It still uses the truehd on systems that support it and I’ve seen it transcode the truehd track as well when it’s not default. Very weird behavior. I did find this in the log file:
Sep 25, 2025 12:38:09.933 [22396] DEBUG - Jobs: ‘C:\Program Files\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Transcoder.exe’ exit code for process 6600 is 1 (failure)
Sep 25, 2025 12:38:09.934 [25468] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Terminated session 000002A123857470:32a94fb5-5f7c-4cd3-a7fb-15cc6fd79a8e with reason Conversion failed. The transcoder exited due to an error.
I’m running: 1.43.0.10162
But I have seen this issue on older versions. My original fix was just to remove the truehd, but then I stumbled on the default track fix.
