I am having issues playing back videos with an EAC3 audio track. I have an older Home Theater Receiver without HDMI and use SPDIF to passthrough AC3 and DTS. This works great for the most part. I get Dolby Digital and DTS working great. The only issue I currently have is with the odd file with a EAC3/DD+ audio track. Plex is also trying to passthrough EAC3 to my receiver despite it not supporting EAC3 so all I get is silence.
The two devices I have tested with are:
NVidia Shield TV with an HDMI audio extractor to SPDIF.
Xiaomi Mibox Android TV with SPDIF output.
I get the same results with both.
Ideally what I want is for Plex to transcode any EAC3 audio track to AC3. Is this possible? I guess it would also be good to be able to transcode AAC or FLAC 5.1 files to AC3 as well, but that is less of an issue for me.
PMS is detecting something in the chain (TV) is capable of handling the EAC3. I believe your first step is to turn off the passthrough in the TV and see where that takes you.
If it’s more than that, I can’t be of help and your next step is to spin a test version of the file with AC-3
I have exactly the same issue with Mi Box 3 using SPDIF output to my old receiver with PMS running on Ubuntu 16.04. Tried to change the Adnroid xml profile to force EAC3 to AAC transcoding, but for some reason Plex would passthrough the EAC3 and I get silence from the receiver. Regular AAC and passthrough DTS and AC3 work fine.
Finally, I got angry and implemented a script to execute after my nzbget downloads are done, which uses mkvinfo “$INFILE” to check for CODEC=A_EAC3 and the applyffmpg to convert the audio and copy the video:
I did mean to follow up on this but gave up. I was able to force Plex to transcode to basic stereo after disabling passthrough. Not ideal, but at the time I was at least able to watch the content. Ideally I would like Plex to transcode EAC3 to AC3, but I don’t know if this is possible.
I might look at your method of automatically converting the audio of incoming files. Thanks for your reply.
