Flac with Fire TV 4k

[Kyouma 7]

Hi, according to the Device Specifications for the Fire TV 4k, it should play Flac audio directly, but emby is transcoding it. So i just wondered why that´s happening.

Device Specifications Media Info emby message

[Luke 42078]

Is it 24-bit flac?

[Kyouma 7]

Yes the media is in 24-bit

[Luke 42078]

@ebr can confirm but I think that is the limitation. The device supports flac, just not 24-bit.

[Happy2Play 9780]

But the linked documentation shows.

FLAC. Up to 48kHz, 2 channels, 16-bit and 24-bit (no dither for 24 bit)

[ebr 16182]

Can you provide a sample for testing?

[Kyouma 7]

Here is the Sample, hope MediaFire is okay.

[Kyouma 7]

Were you able to find something?

[ebr 16182]

Hi.  We're still looking into it but there is a difference between straight FLAC audio files and FLAC audio as a stream within a video container so we have to investigate that.

Thanks.

[Kyouma 7]

Anything new on this?

[Luke 42078]

@FrostByte does this sample direct play for you on the emby for android test build?

[Carlo 4561]

On 8/14/2020 at 6:57 PM, Kyouma said:

Here is the Sample, hope MediaFire is okay.

I don't have a FireTV to test with but I have a question for you.  If you put this file on a thumbdrive and attach to the FireTV or play this back from a network directly on the FireTV will it play?

[Kyouma 7]

 

@cayars Since i don't how to playback something on an USB drive or over Network with Fire TV, i copied the File directly to the Fire TV storage and tried playing it back.

But i only could choose 3rd party mediaplayers which were VLC and MX Player pro. While both of them having touble playing back the scenes with some Typesets in it, they did play the File with sound. Though i should say that MX Player pro was using a Software decoder, cant tell what VLC was using. I think it's also important to know that this file is x264 10bit which could be the reason for Software decoding rather than the audio, but im not completely sure on that. I currently dont have any file with x264 8bit flac to test that.

On how to use the Fire TV Player itself is unkown to me, don't know if that would make a difference.

[Carlo 4561]

That's actually what I mean for you to do so thumbs up.

I do believe you likely answered your own question as well why it needs to transcode (10 bit)

[Kyouma 7]

Well im not so sure about that, because the message emby give's is "Reason for transcoding: Audio codec not supported". I know that the Fire TV cant playback x264 10bit, but my question is, why it can't play the audio. Because the Fire TV specs are listing it as supported and that's why i´m asking.

[ebr 16182]

15 hours ago, Kyouma said:

Well im not so sure about that, because the message emby give's is "Reason for transcoding: Audio codec not supported". I know that the Fire TV cant playback x264 10bit, but my question is, why it can't play the audio. Because the Fire TV specs are listing it as supported and that's why i´m asking.

I don't think FLAC can be passed via HLS so, once we need to remux or transcode for some other reason, we must also convert the audio to a format that can be delivered the same way.  @softworkz can correct me if I'm off base here...

[softworkz 5066]

On 10/1/2020 at 4:33 PM, ebr said:

I don't think FLAC can be passed via HLS so, once we need to remux or transcode for some other reason, we must also convert the audio to a format that can be delivered the same way.  @softworkz can correct me if I'm off base here...

@ebr -  The Apple HLS spec allows FLAC, but not via mpegts and it finally ends up in the question which client would support it at all. It's very uncommon.