Tweak to lossless audio handling on AppleTV to skip FLAC transcoding

Feature Suggestions
1

I know we’d all love lossless passthru but I believe that is not possible on available AppleTV’s due to hardware limitations.

I have an alternative proposal. I believe right now a lossless audio track has to be transcoded to FLAC and then PCM so right now it looks like Dolby TrueHD --> FLAC --> PCM

Could this be changed so it’s simply Dolby TrueHD --> PCM?

A toggle would be fine if you needed to maintain FLAC transcoding for compatibility, or, if it’s possible, you detect if the connected device supports PCM and drop the FLAC transcode automatically.

Why? I’ve been goofing with a Infuse trial and noticed that they didn’t appear to transcode lossless tracks to FLAC. When I reached out to their support folks, they confirmed this. They go straight to PCM.

I realize for most this probably doesn’t matter BUT in my case, with my sound system, with my content, I can perceive a sound quality difference and after some A:B testing I enjoyed the sound from Infuse better and would like the same audio from the Plex App.

2

All three sound formats you are mentioning are lossless.
Which means if done correctly, not a single sample should change due to the format conversation. At playback, all the samples would arrive in the same way at the DAC, no matter which format was used.

3

  1. Plex on Apple TV: [TrueHD] transcode → [FLAC] decode → [PCM]

  2. Infuse on Apple TV: [TrueHD] decode → [PCM]

My understanding is that the final output (PCM) will be the same bit for bit. So audio quality should be exactly the same.

Am I incorrect?

4

That’s what everyone says and from a technical standpoint, I believe, is correct.

Maybe it’s my AVR but I can hear a difference between Infuse and Plex’s handling of audio when doing A:B comparisons on the same content.

I am also a fan of not adding complexity where it isn’t required and I have to assume 3 steps is more complex than 2 steps.