Something weird is going on here. I have my HTPC (PMP v3 preview) send audio via HDMI to my TV, which in turn passes it on untouched via the TV’s optical output to my receiver.
Because the final output is an optical cable, I set in PMP audio settings “spdif”. This works great. PMP treats the audio appropriately for spdif.
BUT if I play EAC3 it seems to either not work at all, or it tries to send the audio despite it’s set up as spdif. Not sure which. The result is no audio either way.
It could be that the HDMI reports supporting EAC3, but PMP still shouldn’t do this since I set it to spdif. I think this is a bug.
Thanks for the idea. I tried this earlier but it doesn’t work. The reason is (I think) that if EAC3 is unchecked there, PMP will send 5.1 PCM though the HDMI. Which is expected but is incompatible with an optical cable. This is the reason for selecting spdif in PMP because it transcodes all audio to AC3/DTS (the only thing supported by optical).
I don’t know where you got the idea that it was trying to passthrough EAC3. It’s doing nothing even close to the sort.
What’s really happening is it is failing to open the AC3 encoder, the EAC3 decoder, and complaining about all the codecs in general. Look at all the lines in the logs containing [ ERROR ] and you’ll see what I’m referencing. Maybe try deleting the directory C:/Users/Cookie/AppData/Local/PlexMediaPlayer/Codecs/20fed83-2696-windows-x86_64-standard and thus force it to start afresh and see if that works better.
Also, is PMP allowed to write to the directory C:/Users/Cookie/AppData/Local/Temp/? It’s complaining that it cannot write to a subdir of that directory that it creates.
I tried deleting the folder a few times and try to play various movies. The h264 decoder gets downloaded again properly each time. The ac3 decoder as well (there is proper audio output if I play a ac3 movie too).
However, the EAC3 decoder does not get downloaded when I play such a movie. That must be the problem, right?
Yes, PMP has access to the temp folder. I went there and it had created a few folders seemingly related to the EAC3 codec (I’m guessing from the filenames) but they were all empty.
Edit: the empty folder names in the temp folder seems to relate to easy audio encoder. (They are named eae). Also that folder is missing in PMP and does not get downloaded. I tried putting it back from my PMP 2 profile folder that I saved just in case, but every time PMP starts, it just gets deleted. Not sure how relevant any of this is, if at all.
My experience: Setting PMP to SPDIF tells it to use the SPDIF output of your PC, which you are not using. This means things like HDMI negotiation on supported codecs, passthrough vs transcoding audio, etc may not function correctly.
If I set PMP v3.0.0.24 on my PC to SPDIF it sends no audio via HDMI. If I change PMP to use HDMI, audio functions correctly.
Questions / Suggestions:
What make/model of TV? Double check tech specs to see which codecs are supported.
Double check settings to make sure it will correctly pass audio via SPDIF.
When Device Type = HDMI, what are your choices for Channels and Device in PMP settings?
Suggest setting Channels to 5.1. Device will depend on your PC hardware/software.
On my PC is shows the NVIDIA graphics card and Realtek optical outputs (on motherboard). I choose the NVIDIA graphics card, since I’m using that HDMI port to pass audio & video to the attached TV. Pic below.
For troubleshooting purposes, take the optical connection out of the equation. If you disconnect the optical cable and use TV speakers, to you hear things OK for AC3/EAC3/dts audio?
What happens if you use the non-preview version of PMP?
FYI, VL260M is the model number of the Vizio TV attached to the HDMI port on the Nvidia GPU.
We probably need to sort out why his codec won’t download and why the
2019-11-15 13:55:04 [ ERROR ] ffmpeg/audio: eac3_eae: EAE watchfolder is not writable: C:/Users/Cookie/AppData/Local/Temp/pmp-eae-kQNbHF\Convert to WAV (to 8ch or less)\frame-4288-0-test.tmp
sa2000 spent a some time working on the EAE error in 2017 and 2018.
It will not download a codec for EAC3 but rather that’s handled via EAE (Dolby enforced restriction). So the real crux of the issue is whether EAE is being download, started, and running correctly. It seems that it is failing somewhere along the way.
I can say that it worked fine in PMP v2, so it shouldn’t be a problem with my system.
What I did when installing the v3 preview was simply uninstall v2, deleting the folders manually that it left behind (including the one in appdata\local) and then installing PMP v3 fresh.
My PMP v2 install had the EAE software in the folder - PMP v3 does not get it. Nothing has changed in my computer really. So this has to be a bug in PMP v3 right?
I can also report that even going back to PMP v2 (latest) does have audio issues now suddenly. Regular mp3 playback does no longer work on PMP v2. EAC does though. But EAC stops working on PMP v3. There is something serious going on with the audio codecs here, and I would think you would care more about it.
If this have something to do with the end of life for Windows 7, which both my server and PMP is currently using, then please say so, so that I can start to prepare the update.
I had a similar issue, and a complete reinstall (Win 10 instead of Win 7) + completely new install of latest Plex Server + Desktop Player seemed to fix the EAC3 5.1 issue. But I’m not certain whether it was the Win 10 part or the fresh install of the software that did the trick.
You can check my thread here:
There’s also a log file at the top, for anyone who wants to compare notes. There are codec errors in that as well. And no special permissions were set/disabled for writing to any temp dir on my Win 7 setup (no permission I could detect checking the folder properties, at least).
