Audio Pop/Click on Roku Express 4K+ Plex AAC 5.1/7.1 Surround

This is just a quick post about a dumb problem that I had a lot of trouble pinning down: audio popping on my Roku. The tl;dr is: set "direct play" to "auto" instead of "forced." If you'd like to understand why, keep reading.

Background

I got a new TV recently--a Hisense U7H--to replace my crappy, ultra-budget TCL 4-series Roku TV. I was planning to use the built-in Android OS to run the Plex app to stream media from my local server but the app apparently sucks in a number of strange ways, especially when it comes to music and playlists, so I bought a cheap Roku Express 4K+.

The Problem

Some of my videos started having an annoying popping/clicking in the audio. I tried the same videos with the native Android app and that resolved the clicking, so I was pretty sure it was Roku-specific. From there, I did some googling and came up with some possibilities: apparently Roku OS 10 has some sort of issue with AAC and AC3 streams, and there are some issues with Roku's "audio leveling" feature. I tried reencoding the audio on a persistently popping video from AAC to AC3 and the popping went away, so I don't think it was the OS 10 issue, and I didn't have the audio leveling enabled in the first place, so it didn't seem to be that one either.

Additionally, I tried playing the offending video on Jellyfin to rule out any Plex-specific issue and popped/crackled there, too.

One of the posts in the audio leveling thread caught my eye, though:

With a little more searching, I learned that Roku devices apparently cannot playback AAC via hardware at all(?) and will, at best, convert them to something else, but they apparently don't have the grunt to decode multi-stream audio--like 5.1 or 7.1 surround--at full speed, which results in the popping.

The Solution

The solution appears to be changing the "direct play" setting in the player/client from "force," which I had selected to minimize the CPU load on my server, to "auto." Your server will have to reencode the audio more often, but it should get rid of the pops.