We’ve had a Home Theatre system for years. It uses a Denon 3808 AVR and a home-built HTPC running Plex on Windows.
Last year, I replaced the the original 6th generation Intel NUC that was the HTPC’s hardware with a new 13th generation ASUS NUC and installed Windows 11 on it.
This week we sat down to watch something on it, but the video would not play, it just froze. I tried playing it on my Desktop PC (also running Windows 11 and Plex), and that was fine, no problem.
Scratching my head, I wondered whether it was a problem with the versions of Plex I was using – on the HTPC I use the version of Plex designed specifically for HTPCs, while on the Desktop PC, I use Plex for Windows (i.e. mouse-driven).
So I installed and tried Plex for Windows on the HTPC. This time, the problem video would play, but there was no sound…
It then occurred to me to see what audio codecs were being used in this video – and it was using the EAC3 codec.
A search on the web quickly found the culprit – bloody Microsoft again. They’ve removed the EAC3 codec from newer versions of Windows 11, apparently in the belief that it is installed by PC manufacturers these days. Well, hello, I was this particular PC’s manufacturer, and you never bothered to tell me that I needed to explicitly install the codec. My Desktop PC was originally running Windows 10 (which had the codec supplied by Microsoft) and the codec was retained when I upgraded to Windows 11. That was why the video would play on my Desktop PC but not on the HTPC.
Another hunt on the web turned up a source for the codec, so it was downloaded and installed on the HTPC. It just took hours of frustration before I found what the problem was: Microsoft – as usual.
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