I have the following environment: Plex Server on a HP proliant server, a Nvidia shield as client and 2k TV with Ac3 audio only.
When I play a 2k film everything is ok, the server transcodes when needed.
But if I play a 4k film the the following happens:
1.) If the the film contains AC3, DTS as audio everything is fine. The Nvidia itself handles the transcoding from H265 to H264 and to AC3 ,so no transcoding on server side is needed.
2.) If I play a 4k film with EAC3 audio, which the Nvidia cannot handle, then the server transcodes the audio to aac. But unfortunately the H265 is tanscoded to H264 as well, which ist not necessary.
In the end , I cannot play the film, because the server is not able to transcode.
A 4k TV would not solve the problem, It would mean that the TV should have all audio codes built in.
My question, why does the server not transcode audio only ?
1 - That is wrong. The Shield does not convert h265 to h264. The Shield supports h265 so it will play it.
2 - As mentioned in 1, h265 should play. Please playback a file causing this issue, then provide the logs from the app. Android, Android TV, Fire TV Logs | Plex Support
Another user recently experienced something similar, but in their case the audio codec was TrueHD. Any time they played the file with the TrueHD stream selected, Plex would transcode the HEVC stream to H.264 as well as transcoding TrueHD to E-AC3 (I believe). However, the same file also had an AC3 stream available; if it was selected, both the HEVC video and AC3 audio streams would direct play. The assumption was that this proved the client was capable of direct-playing the HEVC video, and that something about having to transcode the audio was forcing the video to transcode as well. Perhaps a profile/container/codec mis-match issue?
I’m not sure if it will be useful, but here’s the other thread. There were some server logs included there (I don’t think client logs were asked for or provided). The issue seems similar, but may be entirely unrelated. The client was Android-based, but not a Shield.
Depending on the device, some codecs cannot be direct streamed. It’s either direct play or transcode. This is why logs are important to understand the situation.
Chromecast 2020 with google tv does not support e-ac3 but does support hevc
however a file with e-ac3 still causes the full stream to be transcoded both video and audio.
Disable video stream transcoding=checking this causes the whole file not to be playable anymore
Disable transcoding of the video stream in transcoder operations. With this set, the transcoder may still transcode audio as well as remux video.
i want only audio transcode since video&audio transcode is too heavy for the server.
Howto do this?
Forum is full of questions like this without proper solution. I’m a paying customer so would appreciate a solution
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