Hi all,
I have been using plex for a while and am very happy with it, I have it on Roku3 , PS3 raspberry pi 2 and an old popcorn hour . I am looking to upgrade my amp to obtain atmos ability but am confused over which devices will support hd audio and atmos when playing via plex. I recently went down the raspberry pi 2 and rasplex route as I understood that it would play all formats without transcoding but I have just found out that at the moment hd audio and atmos cannot be played back via rasplex.
Could someone advice which if any plex devices support atmos and true hd streams as there is little point in shelling out hundreds for a new amp if I cannot get any benefit from it if I want to retain plex.
I can’t give you any direct answers but I can at least inform you of some of the issues so you know what to look for. There are two ways to get Atmos audio from the client to the receiver:
Passthrough where the raw compressed audio is sent to the receiver and the receiver does the decoding. The Raspberry Pi 2 does not have the bandwidth on its HDMI port to passthrough some of the lower bitrate HD audio sources much less Atmos. I can’t speak to the 3 but I’d be a bit surprised if this has changed. I’ve heard reports of success in this method using a computer such as an Intel NUC but I’ve not tried it myself (I don’t have an Atmos capable receiver but it works for the other HD audio sources). Hopefully others can give confirmation. There may be some other clients that would passthrough Atmos but I don’t know off the top of my head.
The client decodes the audio and send it to the receiver. HDMI 2.0 has the ability to send 32 audio channels. Atmos can require up to 12 and prior HDMI specs were limited to 8 channel with precludes Atmos. This would require the client to do the Atmos decoding and I’m not sure if there is any code available that does so. Additionally both the client and receiver would need to negotiate the channel layout but I would expect the spec already includes this.
In the end, you are likely better off with a client that can passthrough.
I have an older Intel NUC with Win10 on it and PMP and no problems using it with my Denon receiver and handles both ATMOS and DTS:X movies via pass-through.
