While there are problems with devices that limit plex’s options, if plex really cared about multichannel, they absolutely could make it work.
I don’t know much about shields, but I do know that Kodi is able to get multichannel to work rather reliably on shield devices. They’re always suggesting I should go that route rather than deal with the garbage fire stick devices.
For the firesticks - some of the devices can do multichannel with kodi, some can’t. So while there is some blame to place on amazon there, that will only get plex so far - as some devices can be made to work with multichannel as kodi has proven, and some can work in a compromised way, also done by kodi by having options to transcode audio to dolby digital. Not a way I’d want to do multi-channel - but at least there’s some sort of workaround that kodi has for those devices that can’t do anything else.
Plex absolutely can and should be doing more.
But - I can’t even get plex to recognize that a server that all my other equipment can see exists, let alone do multichannel, and support around here is unfriendly and unhelpful, so I’ve pretty much moved on to only using kodi, as plex is nothing but worthless trash coded by idiots.
