Hi. Im a bit puzzled as to why my HEVC isnt direct played. Both that and AAC audio is being transcoded. Shield should support both. I think it has to do with the softcoded subtitles. Ive used subtitle edit to extract them and save as .SRT. That doesnt fix it tho when i look in Plex Dash. It just adds the line:
SRT External, Transcode (ASS)
If i press “none” to subtitles, then video isnt transcoding, but the audio still is.
I guess my questions are:
How do i avoid video transcoding with subtitles, when even an .SRT doesnt fix it? And why does that .SRT say “(ASS)”, isnt that a different format?
Why is my audio being transcoded? + As long as i can get video to directplay, i assume transcoding audio isnt that bad?
if the aac is being transcoded, its probably because you have passthrough enabled and your receiver or tv doesn’t support that audio codec.
you could disable pass through in the shield system (and/or plex advanced options, I forget) options, then the shield would decode it (to pcm) and pass that through to your tv/receiver.
Hmm this area isnt my best but i have Shield connected to TV with HDMI, and a soundbar connected to TV using optical.
I’ve been able to set it up so that the audio buttons on the Shield remote can control my soundbar, which is nice.
What exactly does passthrough and what would the consequence be of disabling it?
passthrough sends the audio stream directly to the playback device, so neither plex or the shield would decode or modify it.
with passthrough, the audio would be sent to the tv to decode, and if it doesn’t support aac (or dts or truehd, etc) then plex would transcode it to a compatible format.
normally you would want pass through enabled, however since it sounds like the tv and/or soundbar don’t like aac, you might want to disable it so the shield can direct play it (no transcoding) and decode it before sending to tv/soundbar.
