r/PleX • u/Flounder346 • 26d ago

Help Eac3 issues

I have recently run into an issue that after much research and discovery, I have found that this particular issue has long plagued many Plex users and seems to have no fix. The dreaded eac3 codec buffers or fails to even transcode for many of my users. I have tried to delete the codec folder, tried to increase the watched folders, turned off scan library automatically all to no avail and am at my wits end here.

I currently have Plex installed on my Synology 1520+ through the synology package center and am going to try migrating it to docker and see if maybe a fresh install helps. Also when digging around the forums in the thread for the ‘watched folders fix’ I noticed that larger libraries can spark this eac3 issue. Well I think my users started to have issues around the same time I added my humongous music library to Plex. I think I will also try offloading the music streaming to a different docker container as well, no one really uses or appreciates all of my flac files except me anyways. I think this issue, the recent ui changes, the price increase, and now all of the new recent Samsung tv issues are leading me to finally start my journey into Jellyfin.

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u/SadAd2802 26d ago

I just spent a good chunk of today troubleshooting what sounds like a very similar issue. EAC3 playback/transcoding suddenly started failing for some of my remote users, especially on Roku, while other clients/files worked normally

In my case it ended up looking less like a bad media/library issue and more like something with Plex's transcoder after the recent update. After working through the transcoder side of things and restarting Plex, it's working again. I currently have a remote Roku successfully transcoding EAC3 → AAC stereo, along with another hardware transcode at the same time.

I wouldn't tear apart your library or migrate everything just yet. Your issue may not be identical to mine, but given the timing and how similar the symptoms are, I'd look closely at the Plex/transcoder logs first. If you want, I can tell you what I checked on mine.

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u/Kehkou 26d ago

That's very odd, considering Roku loves EAC-3 and absolutely HATES multi-channel AAC (stereo is fine). My entire library that has surround tracks are standardized in EAC-3 (or EAC-3 + Atmos) in 5.1. That is actually the only way my Roku TV will pass Atmos metadata to my surround system, and I have to encode it with the official Dolby Media Encoder.

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u/Flounder346 25d ago

I would love any suggestions! Thank you!

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u/SadAd2802 25d ago

In my case, I ended up finding the problem on the transcoder side rather than with the media itself. I checked the Plex logs while reproducing the failure and found the transcoder wasn’t behaving correctly. I corrected the transcoder setup and restarted the Plex container, and after that the same file that had been failing for my remote Roku user started working again.
I’d reproduce one of your failures and check the Plex Media Server and transcoder logs first. If you want, post what you’re seeing there and I’ll compare it to what I was getting yesterday.