@MurphyBed said:
Another entire year has gone by and, despite all the interest and solid arguments for supporting Quick Sync, Plex still can’t be bothered to support a technology that’s now several years old and offers massive benefits to their core business and customers. What’s more, as I explained earlier in this thread, it could also save millions of dollars in electricity bills and save massive amounts of energy and, literally, significantly benefit the planet. All if just one person spent perhaps a week or two incorporating existing published code into Plex. How is that not worth it?
It’s hard to believe, after years of people asking, Plex management is unaware of this issue. Despite, no doubt, being aware of the benefits, I don’t think Plex has ever publicly even acknowledged this issue let alone offered a reason why they haven’t supported it or any promise of when they might in the future. It’s really sad something with such huge potential continues be ignored year after year by Plex.
Plex seems to be yet another greedy and largely marketing driven company largely out of touch with what their users really want and even what make sense. I dropped my Plex pass a long time ago and I’d encourage others not to give a dime to Plex until they can be bothered to spend a trivial amount of resources to finally support Intel Quick Sync.
The issue is that since Plex uses ffmpeg to transcode, they want those guys to implement it upstream of them. This is an issue because it is open source software, so waiting could literally take forever.
If they pay a developer to add it to ffmpeg, then their competitors will get it also. If they fork ffmpeg and make that part closed source (which might not even be possible) then they will lose all the good ffmpeg updates that come out. They would have to patch every version they chose to release with their code.
Obviously they should suck it up and help the ffmpeg guys get it done, even if the competitor’s will get it also. The business case would be;
- Release to Plex Pass first, lots of NAS users would want this feature ASAP.
- PR the saved green house gases/electricity saved by Plex users. Plex is helping save the planet, etc. People really do support companies over this.
If the development is that expensive (which I don’t see how it could be more expensive then SSL) then keep it a Plex pass only feature. Obviously people could hack it in, but most people don’t want to do any of that, or even know what ffmpeg is for that matter. Most people would much rather just buy Plex Pass then build a new PC, if they can get away with it.
I have a feeling it is harder then it is expensive.
