Hi,
I searched for this, but couldn't find anything on this topic. Apologies in advance if this is a duplicate.
There appears to be a bug (or, possibly, an unintended consequence) in the current version of Plex for Android TV, perhaps specific to the Sony Android TV line, that is forcing unneeded video transcodes, but only when subtitles are enabled and an audio format requiring transcoding is found. The expected behaviour would be a Direct Play for the video and subtitles, with an audio-only transcode
Take this example of a video file with this structure :
- Matroska container
- h264 video
- DTS-MA audio
- AC3 448k audio
- Forced SRT subtitles
Manually selecting the AC3 audio results in a Direct Play, with subtitles correctly displayed when forced. This is the behaviour that is expected.
However, upon switching the audio stream to the DTS stream, this not only triggers the expected audio transcode, but it also triggers a video transcode to burn the subtitles in -- despite the TV being perfectly happy to Direct Play the video and subtitles.
Disabling the subtitles then returns the TV to Direct Stream of the video and transcode of the DTS audio stream - which is again expected.
I believe that when the Android client is telling the Plex Media Server to transcode audio due to the capabilities of the device, it also tells the PMS to burn any enabled subtitles to the video stream, regardless of whether those subtitles can be Direct Played by the device or not. if there are no subtitles enabled, Direct Play works fine on video as expected.
Can this be investigated with the possibility of a fix please ? In my specific case the video transcode is causing occasional problems with my NAS which has plenty of grunt enough to cope with an audio transcode no problem, but burps occasionally on a 1080p video/audio transcode so this would be hugely helpful to me and I suspect other low power PMS users.
Cheers,
hspencer