For those of you experimenting with custom profiles, I stumbled upon this. Seems like someone with more experience has been tinkering around. I’m testing it now…
For stuff that I know is HEVC, I manually set the quality to Original when syncing. The one show I have is HEVC 1080p and seems to work very well on my iPhone8. Plex doesn’t even attempt to transcode, the file just shoots across wifi almost instantly.
I’ve also tried to force Plex to transcode from h264 to HEVC by removing references to h264 in the transcode target but that has resulted in sync failure errors. I was doing this to try and save space as I’ve got HW transcoding enabled and don’t mind the additional delay in exchange for storage efficiency.
I think the Plex team is doing a pretty great job when I imagine how many different platforms they support and how difficult it must be to figure this stuff out for each and every device out on the market. HEVC is a minefield of support and licensing issues that even web browsers and OS’s struggle to support. Hopefully things will get easier over time.
