What are everyone’s thoughts on the new Apple TV possibly supporting bitstream output and if so how soon plex might support that? I would love to get rid of my aging nvidia shield and gain media artwork and playback time again from the plex player while only having to use one box the Apple TV.
I’ll believe it when it works. It wasn’t in the first betas of tvOS 26 and seems to be mostly based on fanboy clickbait rumors based on assuming that a line in a header file means an immediate public feature.
Also, since Plex specializes in transcoding, which is the exact opposite of passthrough, I would probably choose Infuse and I would predict as a much smaller company that Infuse will be earlier than Plex on supporting it. But OTOH Plex has a great Media Guide in Roomie, and Infuse has yet to provide such an API. So for general use where passthrough is not the priority, Plex is preferred.
Anyway, the more important point is that Apple has basically not even mentioned this feature, it’s been absent from the early betas, and I question their commitment to it until it is in a production release with supported software. I do think something is happening at some point, but anything more than that is supposition.
But… I ditched nVidia Shield for anything other than testing years ago. That thing was hopelessly out of date. Zidoo is a reasonable current alternative.
My one and only reason I still use it is bitstream pass through to my AVR for Dolby Atmos. I don’t have a zidoo since I also share my library with a friend and occasionally use the remote stream for either music or tv. So I make use of plex. But I’ll be pleased when I no longer need to rely on it.