Hello everybody, I have tried searching for this answer and haven’t found anything so I’m creating a post. Hopefully somebody will be able to help me.
I’m looking into running a plex server for the main idea of direct playing local 4k movies to my 4k OLED TV. I’m pretty new to this but this is what I wanted to setup:
Was going to buy a NAS to act as media storage and the plex server (thinking of the Qnap Ts 453d). I already have an NVIDIA shield pro which was going to act as my playback device and my plex client. This will all be watched on a 4k LG OLED C1 TV. I also have 300 mb/s Internet.
My main plan was to watch 4k movies/shows through direct play and not having to transcode. However, I completely overlooked the fact I’d need a 4k audio receiver for it to be able to direct play.
So my first question:
will I for sure be transcoding 4k audio? I’m getting mixed answers online. Some people say because of my shield I won’t have to transcode 4k audio but this doesn’t make sense to me as my TV doesn’t support DTS.
if I am transcoding 4k audio, I won’t be able to direct play correct? Buying a receiver is not an option right now as I live in an apartment and feel that a system like that would be too loud and unnecessary. If I am transcoding 4k audio, will this be a problem for my current nas + shield setup? I wanted to avoid transcoding as I don’t want buffering issues.
Any help I can get on this would be very appreciated!!!
I don’t know what 4K audio is. The Shield will passthrough lots of different types of audio. If your TV doesn’t support the specific audio codec, and you want those fancy 7.1 audio formats, then you will need a receiver that does support it. Otherwise, you will just get stereo output to your TV.
If the audio does need to be converted to stereo, that is a fairly lower cpu-intensive task and Plex Media Server running on a NAS should be able to handle it.
Sorry I’m not the smartest with this stuff. I meant whatever audio they’d use to support 4k video, so I guess DTS?
And yes, my tv would need this codec converted to a stereo output. Good to know that the Plex + Nas will be able to handle it, thanks for the response!
You can have different types of audio, there is no 1 used for 4k video. Some videos will have more than 1 type of audio too.
In the Plex app on the Shield, there is a setting called “passthrough”. Turn that off. PMS will then convert anything not supported into 2-channel stereo and send that for your TV. No need for a receiver. You only need the receiver if you want the sound coming out of something other than your TV.
You can use the Shield as your server and client at the same time. Yes, it has the ability and is capable of transcoding audio. It can even transcode videos if needed (although 4k hevc might be slow).
