I don’t currently have an Apple TV and the only thing holding me back is that Plex doesn’t seem to allow lossless audio pass through. Is the new app being developed with this feature in mind? As I understand it’s a highly requested feature.
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If you mean TrueHD and DTS-MA then it won’t happen just from the new UI. Plex plays what the client device will natively support and AppleTV doesn’t natively support those formats. If AppleTV changes to support those formats then Plex might support it.
I say might because DTS-MA 7.1 plays natively on Roku via DLNA\USB but Plex chose not to support it.
I could’ve sworn they were redoing the player due to sync issues and Dolby visions issue. Plus the ATV plays lossless through Infuse right? So it can handle it?
Infuse converts DTS and TrueHD to PCM.
Lossless conversion, but Atmos and :X info is lost.
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FordGuy61 has you covered on the audio and the
is a different thing - video format vs audio format - and it really depends on the format which gets even more complex than just disc format vs streaming format but I do think they are testing a newer player that can handle some of the Dolby Vision and HDR format a bit better.
Essentially what most of the streaming boxes run into is that they are designed to work with streaming formats and not disc formats because they don’t expect to play discs. TrueHD+Atmos and DTS-MA are disc only formats. DolbyDigital and DolbyDigital+Atmos are streaming formats and are fully supported.
Could they passthrough the audio and be done with it? Yup. Don’t need hardware support for it. The other issue is the software\license to convert TrueHD\DTS-MA+Atmos to DD+Atmos is very restricted and expensive so converting isn’t feasible (conversions using that software also tags it with a traceable key if I remember correctly).
The same is true for DV and HDR profiles - some are streaming only and some are disc only and support there is funny. It’s even more complex than the audio so I’ll skip trying to summarize it here.
Could they passthrough those? No. The hardware has to support it.
The issue though is that supporting disc formats on a device that doesn’t playback discs puts those devices into a grey area that they often don’t want to get involved with at all. The only people who need bluray disc format digital playback support are people who rip discs for playback… and even for legal uses that’s been hard to support (it’s legal to have a digital copy of a disc you own, but it is illegal to crack the security to get that copy because the security is private IP). WDTV was an awesome set top box that was basically VLC of set top boxes and they got hit with a bunch of stuff from rights holders claiming their box was just for piracy because of that support and eventually had to shut down. Boxee box had similar issues.
Anyways… there’s some hope for getting those audio formats supported because simple passthrough is really all it takes (doesn’t even require a license cost) but the hardware has to allow the passthrough and that also adds another service to support. The video formats for DV\HDR might work out in the future as they get closer to uniform formats.
Suffice to say if you want a device that plays everything natively the Shield is essentially it while other devices are a mixed bag (I think FireTV and CCwGTV offer some mixed support).
I read somewhere they were working towards a common code base across their web and various apps. React and React Native.
