For those with the nVidia Shield TV or Shield TV Pro, (@joshfee_gmail.com, @FlaTechNole21, @jlm86, @bee_ryan, @TheShuriken ), this issue is actually an Android issue (or rather an issue of devices not being updated to Android 10+) and not Plex. Music is handled differently from video on Android and prior to Android 10 it only support stereo music at a maximum of 16 bit depth and multiples of 48kHz.
What’s more is especially if you’re talking about nVidia, they don’t even recognize that people want this feature. They even denied that upgrading to 10 would even fix the issue even though I provided them with documentation to the contrary in a now-deleted post on the Shield TV forums.
If you want this fixed, talk to nVidia. It’s not even just surround music, it’s all high-rez music, including DSD.
There’s a lot of things I’m frustrated with Plex about, but this one ain’t their fault.
They could write their own decoder or use another like Kodi, but you’ll get better results with the new Android audio subsystem than you will with most third party decoders. Also Plex has limited developers and $$$ and that stuff ain’t free, especially if you’re talking about DTS or Dolby formats where there are patents and proprietary formats. Yes there may be some FOSS decoders, but they don’t always handle all the formats correctly. And it’s not just so easy to completely rebuild their music playback system to incorporate their own decoder, especially when they would need to do it just for Android or roll it out to all devices and then they’d have to maintain basically a separate code fork… It’s just not really feasible with all the devices they support.
Enby has this same issue too.
I have been down this rabbit hole for a few minutes, but apparently nVidia thinks nobody wants to upgrade to the newest Android, and I’m banned now for calling them out for their developers downvoting criticism on their forums and for calling them out on adding support for Control4 which is a pretty esoteric and very expensive home automation solution instead of hi-res audio. Which they then said was because many many more people had requested it over hi-res or multichannel audio (which I call BS on, but whatever). So I did as much as I could. If you want it fixed, go there and make sure they’re aware that it’s not just me wanting that feature.
For non nVidia users… do the same with the manufacturer of your device.
Of course if that doesn’t fix it, then Plex may actually have something to look into, but until then, Plex devs can’t do a whole lot. Read the full thread I linked previously…
Also, if you want nVidia to do anything, you need to contact their support and their forums. Also their support will likely tell you that they do support it, but then they’ll link you to a support page that says they play back SOURCES in multichannel or hi-res, but it may play those sources, it does not play them back at original quality or number of channels.
You can share this post with them: https://source.android.com/devices/audio/highres-effects
Which they may say that 10 isn’t available for Android TV yet (yes, they told me that too), so I provided them with this: Android 10 on Android TV launched, new developer-only streamer, too
