Upgraded my TV and now don't get audio from Sonos Playbar anymore with DTS

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My setup used to be as follows:

  • Vizio M70 TV
  • Nvidia Shield
  • Plex Server (latest)
  • Sonos Playbar, connected to TV via Optical cable

Everything worked, including videos with a DTS soundtrack, without me needing to change any settings on the fly. I know that the Sonos Playbar doesn’t support DTS, so presumably one of the 2 things were happening:

(A) PMS was transcoding DTS to DD
or
(B) The Vizio TV was auto switching between bitstream and PCM

I’m pretty sure it was (A) since I was getting full surround sound even on movies with DTS tracks and my understanding is PCM would not support that (correct me if I’m wrong). Also my understasnding was that my vizio M70 TV did not support DTS through optical, so PMS was detecting this and knowing it should transcode. However, I may be full of Sh*t here and something else is going on to have it previously working :slight_smile:

Yesterday, I upgraded my TV to a Sony XBR-75X900E which support DD out of the optical line. There has been past threads reporting issues with the XBGR line about audio dropping out over optical, but they released a firmware last year that resolved this.

Anyways, after I got the TV setup, I tested things out. I could hear sound through the playbar without any issues such as Nvidia Shield TV system sounds and apps like Youtube and Netflix. ** I then switched to Plex app on the Shield TV and could hear the plex system sounds fine. If I play anything with a stereo soundtrack like my kid’s TV shows, things are fine.**

**However, when I tried to play anything with a DTS track, I get no sound. ** . For example, this is when I’m playing Casino Royale, which only has a DTS Track. The Plex Web reports it as playing through “Direct Play”, which I assume means there is no audio transcoding either and DTS is being passed to the Sonos Playbar and why there is silence.

I know the Sonos Playbar doesn’t support DTS, but remember this used to work previously. Since I’m assuming there was audio transcoding going on previously, how can I get this to work again with my new TV? Is there a profile to tweak? **I currently do not have any profiles installed… my Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Profiles folder is empty and I never set anything up.

Update: After doing some research, I’ve found suggestions that indicate an Android.xml file in Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Profiles should force transcoding. This is the file: Android TV XML Profile for Plex - Pastebin.com. Notice Line 4 has “ac3” specified instead of aac, which is supposedly meant to force the transcode:

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mp4" codec="h264" audioCodec="ac3" context="streaming" />

However, this isn’t doing anything for me despite me restarting PMS after putting the xml file into the right place.

Help!

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@trumpy81 said:
Check your TV audio settings, you may be able to output DTS as PCM, which hopefully your soundbar supports.

Unfortunately no settings seems to be there to do this.

Also, check the Plex app settings, it may allow you to output DTS in another format, although I do think that is likely, or you may not have it set to pass through DTS, which would block the audio from being passed to your TV.

I swear i remember seeing settings for this, but can’t find them. I’ve looked in the settings of the Plex app on the SHIELD TV, but nothing there about DTS. Is this a server setting somewhere? I figured this would be client specific.

Failing that, you may need to re-encode the audio to Dolby Digital or some other format that your soundbar supports.

This might be what I need to do, but trying to avoid this as my movie collection is large.

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I remember when I was running Plex on a Raspberry Pi (with Rasplex), there were individual settings to state client support for DTS vs. DD, etc. In the SHIELD TV plex app, this granularity is missing. It appears there is a single setting that says “Audio Passthrough”.

I experimented turning that off now, and if I do that, PMS shows that Video is DirectPlay, and Audio is being transcoded from DTS to AAC. I now get audio but it’s in stereo vs. 5.1.

6

Update: After doing some research, I’ve found suggestions that indicate an Android.xml file in Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Profiles should force transcoding. This is the file: https://pastebin.com/qymSK4nD. Notice Line 4 has “ac3” specified instead of aac, which is supposedly meant to force the transcode:

<VideoProfile protocol="hls" container="mp4" codec="h264" audioCodec="ac3" context="streaming" />

However, this isn’t doing anything for me despite me restarting PMS after putting the xml file into the right place.