I have two nice television viewing settings in the house with almost the same setup. Both have Denon AVR-X2300W receivers driving Polk speakers with 2017 Sony smart TVs (Android TV). The only difference is that one Sony is a 75" XBR75900E and the other is a 49" XBR49X900. The only connections to the TVs is through the ARC HDMI connection. I use the latest version of PLEX running on a Windows10 Media Server and the PLEX client app that is part of the Andriod TV OS. The problem is that one setup plays the audio fine, such as AC3 and DTS 5.1 formats but the other doesn’t. These formats are played in stereo. I realize that I may have some setting incorrect in Devon receivers and I reached out to Denon but would appreciate it if someone could tell me the best settings for the server and client side of Plex. Thanks.
In the Plex client, is there a setting for Display Information? If so, turn it on (It exists on other Android TV devices, not sure about Sony).
Play a movie/show with AC3 audio and subtitles disabled. During playback, pull up the on-screen controls (pause video, etc). What is shown in upper left corner of screen? Is the video & audio direct playing, direct streaming, or transcoding? If one of latter two, what reason is provided?
Repeat for second TV. Use same movie/show. What is displayed on-screen?
Also enable and pull logs from each Plex client covering playback of same movie. Enable logging in the Plex Android TV client settings. Pull by pointing browser at http://TV_IP_Address:32500/logging. URL, with IP address, is displayed in lower right corner of screen when in Plex client settings. Do not exit Plex app after playback, otherwise you will not be able to pull logs (On Nvidia Shield & Amazon Fire TV devices anyway…).
Attach logs to your reply.
A little more information but no real progress. First of all, AC3 works fine. It is just DTS that does not.
I turned the display information on and as you suspected, the Family Room setup is playing direct without any transcoding but the Bonus Room setup is playing the audio and video directly but is transcoding taking place because “DTS audio is not supported by the device.” But it is.
I have attached the log for the Bonus Room setup.
19-07-08_BonusTV Log.txt (46.7 KB)
Two things I noticed in the logs: 1) audio track selection, and 2) codec download failure.
Make sure you choose a standard DTS audio track, not DTS-HD. HDMI-ARC does not have the bandwidth to pass lossless audio such as DTS-HD & TrueHD, so picking one of those may force a transcode (picking TrueHD will definitely force an audio transcode).
I mention it because of this log entry:
07-08 09:57:44.321 i: [FFmpeg] [WARN] [dca @ 0x68961c00] Channel layout '7.1' with 8 channels does not match specified number of channels 6: ignoring specified channel layout
Note that when choosing audio tracks, the Plex Android TV client does not differentiate between dts and dts-HD audio. Because of this it can be hard to tell if an audio track is dts 5.1 or dts-HD MA 5.1. However, any audio displayed as “dts 7.1” will be “dts-HD MA 7.1,” since there is no such thing as “dts 7.1” audio.
The second thing I saw is it looks like the Plex client is failing to download the dts codec. Since it doesn’t have the correct codec, it spits out the " not supported" message and transcodes the audio. Pertinent log entries below.
Not sure exactly how to solve this. I’ve never run into such a situation. I searched the forum, but did not see anything with a resolution.
Some ideas:
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Check the TV’s internet connection to make sure it can download the codec. Play something from YouTube, Netflix, etc.
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Power cycle the TV (unplug it for 10 - 15 seconds, don’t just turn it off). This completely flushes the app from memory.
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Delete the Plex app, reboot the TV, then reinstall the Plex app.
07-08 09:57:38.147 i: [PlaybackManager] Preparing for Mission Impossible Rogue Nation
07-08 09:57:38.154 i: [DefaultPlaybackManager] Passthrough is enabled.
07-08 09:57:38.190 i: [PlaybackManager] Audio codec required: dca
07-08 09:57:38.190 i: [DefaultPlaybackManager] Playback possible, downloading codecs...
07-08 09:57:38.191 i: [CodecManager] Attempting to download: dca
07-08 09:57:38.198 i: Fetching [method:POST] http://127.0.0.1:32500/services/codecs/decoder/dca?X-Plex-Token=...ZcJX
07-08 09:57:38.255 i: [pms] /127.0.0.1:57635 - POST /services/codecs/decoder/dca
07-08 09:57:38.375 e: Error parsing XML from http://127.0.0.1:32500/services/codecs/decoder/dca?X-Plex-Token=...ZcJX: Unexpected end of document
07-08 09:57:38.380 e: [CodecManager] Unknown return code (0)
07-08 09:57:38.381 i: [DefaultPlaybackManager] Codec failed to downloading, continuing...
<miscellaneous deleted>
07-08 09:57:40.287 i: [TranscodeSession] Media choice updated
07-08 09:57:40.293 i: [ConnectivityManager] Device is under Ethernet
07-08 09:57:40.299 i: [MediaDecisionEngine] Starting media decision for: Mission Impossible Rogue Nation (part index 0)
<miscellaneous deleted>
07-08 09:57:40.373 i: [MediaDecisionEngine] Transcode server selected: JuncMedia
07-08 09:57:40.374 i: [MediaDecisionEngine] Analyzing media: 1920x804 3603kbps (Container: mkv, Video: h264, Audio: dca)
07-08 09:57:40.374 i: [MediaDecisionEngine] Unable to direct play; DTS audio is not supported by the device
First off, thanks very much for taking the time to help me with this. I do appreciate it.
A couple of things…
There certainly is no problem with connections to the Internet. Both setups are hardwired, not using WiFi. Connecting to Internet sources (YouTube, NetFlix, etc.) is no problem on either TV.
The selection of the audio track isn’t an issue either since there is just the one DTS track and it plays in the Family Room TV but not in the Bonus Room.
You may have hit on something regarding the downloading of the codec. I will try deleting and reinstalling the Plex app as you described as see if that does the trick.
Oh. One more thing. Your first point about the tracks reminded me that there IS a difference between these setups beyond the size of the TV. The Bonus room has 7.1 speakers (L, R, C, RR1, RR2, RL1, RL2, SW) whereas the Family Room is 5.1 (L, R, C, RR1, RL1, SW).
Not sure how that matters but it is a difference.
Still no joy. I unplugged the TV and let it reboot on power up, deleted Plex, rebooted, and reinstalled Plex. No improvement. The log is attached. It still says that the codec could not be downloaded. Where is it being downloaded to and from where?
19-07-08_BonusRoom2.txt (53.0 KB)
I believe the codecs are downloaded from Plex, but I do not know for certain.
I’m not sure where to head next. It seems strange that things work fine for one TV but not the other.
Hopefully one of the Ninjas or employees will pick up on this thread and take a look at things.
The speaker layout will not matter. HDMI-ARC is limited to AAC/AC3/EAC3/dts 5.1 or PCM 2.0. Whether or not the additional two speakers are used in the Bonus Room will depend on the Denon’s sound mode (direct, dts:Neural X, etc).
I’m not aware of any setting in the Denon that would affect things. I’ve a AVR-X4300H. There is nothing in the Denon setup that would do something like disable dts audio.
I was under the assumption that codecs only download at the server.
Thanks @TeknoJunky. Still seems strange, as the TVs are the same except for screen size.
Maybe reboot everything? Turn off TVs & shutdown Plex server. Reboot modem/router/switches/etc. After they’re back online start Plex server. Then start up TVs.
Also grab server logs. Set logs for debug only, not verbose. Play movie on one TV for a couple of minutes, wait two minutes, play on 2nd TV, wait two minutes, and pull server logs & post the .zip to the forum.
I was focusing on client since one TV works OK. Server might have some info too.
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