Support for Apple Spatial Audio

Feature Suggestions
42

@madao You have a direct stream with an AC3 track which means that the profile is working fine.
Me too, I have to enable the old player in order for Spatial Audio to work :wink:

43

Ah ok thanksā€¦
But for me spaziale audio with the old player worked also before without the profileā€¦
I thought that the profile would enable spacial audio with the new playerā€¦

1 Like
44

It doesnā€™t seem to work for me with the profile, still transcoding to AAC to iOS app.
Do I have to add more lines in case Iā€™m using .mkv files instead of mp4?

45

The container doesnā€™t matter. Have to enable old player in settings on the iOS app

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46

This works for AC3 movies using old player, but for some reason doesnā€™t work for AAC 5.1.
Is there any way AAC 5.1 could be made to work with this profile xml?

1 Like
47

I am experiencing the same issue ā€œCouldnā€™t create the playback session for this itemā€ after adding the iOS.xml into the profiles folder. Did you find a solution? thank you

SOLVED: I was creating the XML using Rich Text format instead of Plain text with Textedit. Changed it to plain and it works perfectly.

1 Like
48

May be same for what gross said. But this profile didnā€™t work for me or I didnā€™t do it right.
My Profiles is created under:

/Users//Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Profiles/iOS.xml

49

I have a feeling our AirPods will be in the trash can long before Plex implements it in their new player, or even looks at this thread.

1 Like
50

For Unraid users here, you can add @Saiks script by putting you iOS.xml file in here:

/mnt/user/appdata/*your_container*/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/Profiles/iOS.xml

It works for me at least :smile:

3 Likes
51

I wrote a small blog post explaining all the steps neceserry to activate it on your server. Hope it will help somebody out!

https://dwffls.com/posts/plex-spatial-audio/

4 Likes
52

Awesome, it works!

The latest version of Big Sur just added spatial audio support on Mac. Any chance you could also make a profile that works Does the same
For Macs?

1 Like
53

How is this not enabled by defaultā€¦

Cheers!
Worked like a charm.

54

No luck for me either on the iPad Pro 2018, stuck with AAC.

Could it be related to this?

55

Can we get some comments from Plex devs about this?

1 Like
56

Not working for me: I am running PMS on rasbian on a RPi3. I didnā€™t add the profiles, because the server activity log shows it is direct streaming AC3 5.1 direct play to my iphone 8, and on the plex player (new) it shows the active track is the AC3 5.1

However when I toggle spatial audio in the volume/settings for the Airpods, it says ā€œthis content does not support spatial audioā€.

Seems like Plex is working ok, but there is a problem on the iOS sideā€¦ any suggestions?

Iā€™ve confirmed it works with other movies played directly from iTunes.

thanks!

57

update - still not working in Plex app. However, spatial audio does work when I play video through the safari client on iOS.

I tried loading the profile linked above but no difference.

59

@b0271 Did you set the app to use the old video player?

60

Hi, for unknown reasons I canā€™t get the old player to work at all. When I enable it in settings, videos donā€™t play at all. I just get the spinning circle and an eventual time out. Not sure whyā€¦? Iā€™m in an iPhone 8 Plus.

I get a similar problem when choosing Picture in Picture - it just stalls and stops playing anything.

I can live with watching via safari would much prefer to have this working in the Plex app!

61

I got it working and now have spatial audio within the Plex app with the old player. It took two steps:

  1. To get the old player working, in the app i went to Settings -> Advanced and disabled ā€œallow direct playā€. I donā€™t recall if this is default setting or if i enabled at some point in the pastā€¦, but after this change, I was able to enable the old player and see video (without spatial audio).

  2. after change #1, the server dashboard showed audio being transcoded from AC3 to MP3. To fix that I installed the iOS.xml profile above, restarted the server, and then it showed as ā€œAC3 5.1 -> Direct Streamā€.

previously, with direct play enabled in the app and spatial audio not working the server dashboard showed ā€œAC3 5.1 -> Direct Playā€. Similar but different!

hopefully this can help someone else out also
-b

62

I suppose we have to alter the file to support mkv /x265 etc?

I have followed all steps and itā€™s not working so I guess itā€™s just not configured for mkv?

Well that wasnā€™t working. What did work (and Iā€™m sure this isnā€™t the best way of doing it)

Inside the resources folder is already a profiles folder provided by Plex. I renamed iOS.xml to old iOS.xml and created a copy of tvos.xml which I then renamed to iOS.xml

Is making your own profiles folder a level up is some kind of override for the included profiles found in pms>resources>profiles or did I misread / was the wrong path given?

There may be some hiccup somewhere with the tvos profile being used - Iā€™ll continue to try and learn about overriding or editing a bit the provided one didnā€™t work.

Also thereā€™s no need to make multiple entries for containers that I can see. The Plex default multi items several things. I think the above xml could be consolidated (though I used it as is)

Any info on creating our own profiles folder or how that works would be great. Even better would be if the Plex devs fixed it so we didnā€™t transcode when it was unnecessary and got spatial audio working without mucking about in confit files.