unable to select alternate audio stream

[gyre]

TVHeadend: 4.1-2528~g9fca900d0 on debian jessie
Plex Server: 1.6.1.3722 on debian jessie
LiveTVH: 1.1

Using the plex ios client on an iphone 6, I'm finding that when I look at playback settings, I get an audio stream of Unknown ((null)) and am unable to change it.

This is a pain when the audio channel chosen is the AD channel :)

[taligentx]

Hi @gyre,

This should be interesting, I'll look into multiple audio track streams. At the moment, Plex doesn't support setting the language for an audio stream so selecting them will have to work some other way.

The ((null)) shows up if the audio codec hasn't been set - in the current 1.2 release, you can add channel tags in Tvheadend to specify the codec used in each channel and that field will be populated with AAC or AC3.

Thanks,
Nikhil

[gyre]

Thanks. I'm not so worried about the ((null))... I was including it in case it helped you debug the issue. Being able to select between multiple audio streams would be neat. Thanks.

[mastacheata]

I fear that's not gonna happen unless the tvheadend developers rework their filters and stream profiles stuff.

TVheadend will by default (in pass mode) present an MPEG Transport Stream with multiple audio and possibly subtitle elementary streams. (In theory you could have multiple video streams in a single channel as well, but I haven't yet seen that happening in my cable network)

Plex's Playback engine is unaware of any additional audio/video/subtitle channels except for the very first of each, though.
And there doesn't seem to be a way to switch between them,

If TVheadend would offer the each elementary stream at a different URI, @taligentx could simply add all the different audio and subtitle channels as additional PartObjects and Plex would handle combining the different Audio/Video signals into a single combined AV stream.

A workaround might be playing around with the filter function of TVheadend. That way you can reorder the streams or remove unneccessary streams.
The only problem with that approach: You cannot define several rulesets available at different URLs or via a URL parameter (like possible with the transcoding/repackaging profiles).
i.e.: You cannot define a ruleset to deliver only the 5.1 stream and another to deliver only the stereo stream at the same time.
What you can do is set preferred streams for each service. (i.e. for Sky Sport 1 pick the Stereo stream, but for Syfy pick the AC3 channel if available)

The only way to get around the limitation: Duplicate your channels (and the underlying services) as many times as there are different combinations of Audio, Video and Subtitle Streams you'd like to select.

[gyre]

What you can do is set preferred streams for each service. (i.e. for Sky Sport 1 pick the Stereo stream, but for Syfy pick the AC3 channel if available)

That sounds a workable idea. Thanks :)

[mastacheata]

Added this as a fearture request to TVHeadend:
https://tvheadend.org/issues/4394