I am a long time plex pass owner and fan and recently treated my self to a new Samsung QLED 4K 55QN95A and Samsung Soundbar HW-Q800A (connected using eArc). Plex works perfectly fine on this setup and I am very happy with it. The only downside I found is that I can’t play TrueHD or DTS-MA streams as the TV only does audio passthrough for exteral devices; not apps like plex (Samsung 2021 Audio Always transcoded). The soundbar does support both.
Now i am thinking about buying a secondhand xbox one (maybe the X?). Mostly as an upgrade to my ancient 360 and pickup gaming again. As a bonus, I though it might be interesting to see if I can also use it so play my plex content so I can enjoy TrueHD Atmos. I have a couple of questions, hope someone can help me with that.
I read that i can set the audio to be passtrhough so it should be able to pass on TrueHD with atmos encoding to the soundbar, right? I know the tv had the passthrough setting at least.
As my TV is capable of decoding pretty much all of the content I have, I don’t really have a need for the xbox to do so. But I assume there is no way to pass-on the video to the TV to decode right?
Is the xbox one X capable of direct playing 4k content? Will it play HDR content as wellI? I thought I read somewhere that there is a restriction on h264 encrypted content; is that still the case?
I need the S or X to able to play 4k content, right?
Is there any benefit to buying the xbox series S/X instead of the xbox one when using it with plex? Can it handle different video/audio? Or would be much more quiet?
I know it is a lot of questions. Mostly double checking from what I have read on this beautiful forum so far. Hope someone can help me out.
Kind regards
P.S. I know I can buy a Shield to play it all but I am more than happy with what the TV can do for now. I would be buying the xbox mostly for the gaming; playing TrueHD would be a sweet bonus.
I have heard that x-box is not the best platform for plex as the x-box does not support all the various formats. So do a bunch of research before you buy one. Your best bet would be to get an Invidia Shield Pro as it supports just about every format.
shield pro, xbox1, and more recently the latest gen fire tv cube all support passthrough.
each have their quirks or limitations.
you still need an AVR or soundbar that supports truehd and dts-hd-ma.
I have shield pro’s and and xbox series x.
the shield is generally more reliable for playback of any kind of content, in my experience, but that is not to say the shield never has problems.
its been awhile since I used the xbox, but last I did, it would occasionally randomly drop/desync the audio for a second, which could be fixed by rewinding a few seconds.
I have no experience with the current fire tv cube. I started out with fire sticks, and they were nothing but problematic, so I personally will never use a fire device again.
if you are buying the xbox for gaming, then yes as you say, the passthrough is a nice bonus and should generally work as indicated.
I can personally recommend the series x, especially over the older models, due to the embedded SSD storage (vs older slower HDD models).
I do not know if or how the series S handles plex 4k/passthrough, someone else with one will have to elaborate on that.
The Amazon FireTV Cube gen 3 only passes the lossy DTS 5.1 core. Any -HD and :X audio is dropped.
The TV does not support passthrough of DTS audio formats for externally connected devices. See the review at rtings.com (link, search for “passthrough”).
Whether you end up with an Xbox, Shield Pro, or something else, if you want DTS-HD & DTS:X audio, you’ll need to connect the device to the HDMI input on the soundbar.
@FordGuy61 , good point about the DTS. I guess I can connect the xbox to the soundsbar and have it pass video to the tv. That should work. Or do the other way around as I a mostly interested in TrueHD instead of DTS-MA. TrueHD seems more widely available.
Think I will just get myself an xbox one X for the gaming and see if I can get plex up and running as well. I am perfectly happy with DD+ Atmos audio; just want to see if I can hear the difference with lossless audio on my soundbar. That should be possible.
So I’ve been fighting this on a Series X for about a month now. Figured I’d share my notes.
I have a Series X hardwired to the router and a Synology NAS also hardwired.
Direct Playing 4k HDR with Atmos/TrueHD/DTS/whatever lossless mostly works, but randomly about every 30 minutes to an hour, it will stutter, but then keep playing with audio desynced. Pausing or rewinding re-syncs the audio. Even more rarely, the video will stop playing entirely, looping a quarter second of audio repeatedly until I stop playback or it “recovers” by dropping to 5.1 AAC or whatever the backup audio track is.
These issues don’t happen when playing the same file via the official Plex player for Windows. I’m currently testing the Xbox “Movies and TV” app via the DLNA server built into Plex to see if that gets rid of the hitching as well. So far I haven’t had any issues with this method.
Quick edit: Confirmed that both Xbox and PC Plex players are Direct Play, not Direct Stream. Playback info on Xbox while reproducing the issue confirms it is buffering on a 96Mbps bitrate file on gigabit. DLNA playback of the same file unaffected.
Hi Chan, thanks for the input. I didn’t know you could stream from the DLNA server as well on a xbox. Will definately play around with it!
I bought the Xbox One X couple of weeks ago Like I suggested above. I got it to play TrueHD on a 4K video as well. But then after about 90 minutes the video started having buffering issues each 10 seconds. I stopped the movie, restarted it and didnt have any problems with the last half 30 minutes. ’
I will play most of my content using atmos in dd+ which works perfectly from the app on the tv itself. But its nice to have some way to play TrueHD when in some occasions.
Finally have the DLNA server up and running. I run my Plex in a docket container and DLNA doesn’t seem to work when the container is on a “bridge” network. Moved to “host” and all is fine.
I can play my movies now throught the “movies and tv” and TrueHD is played with any problems. Only tested it for 10 minutes but everything seems ok.
Only problem I have is that it won’t pick up my subtitles. Not the mkv embedded once and not the external srt files. I can only select files that are local on the xbox it seems. @Chan, do you have the same issue?
That’s an unknown from me. I don’t have any media reliant on subtitles, but I have noticed that there are none in short scenes that probably should have them.
I chalked that up to needing transcoding to burn the subtitles into the stream, which I have disabled because my box is not powerful enough to do that.
