Can anyone tellen me if Plex is going to go for AV1 or is it staying with Hevc? I’m transcoding my libb at the moment to HEVC, but if Plex is ging to go for AV1 i might need to retina this…
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Way too early to tell if it will ever be picked up. It is still in development:
It’s finally released today: https://aomedia.org/the-alliance-for-open-media-kickstarts-video-innovation-era-with-av1-release/
You should go with whatever is supported by your Plex clients today.
Even if today Plex supported AV1 and FFMPEG and other tools supported encoding to AV1, it would be moot unless your clients also supported it.
Without client support, Plex would transcode AV1 to x264 before streaming it to your client. All the bandwidth savings and other AV1 goodness would lost.
ffmpeg in Version 4.0 “WU” now supports AV1
https://www.ffmpeg.org/index.html#news
The old Plex Transcoder is based on ffmpeg, so future support for AV1 is at least possible.
Maybe an official can say something about AV1 Support in Plex.
i think AV1 at this time has good Quality but needs a lot of Computing Power for Encoding/ Decoding.
I dont know if there are any Hardware decoders capable of AV1.
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I understand FFMPEG 4.0 has a number of things we want to include.
The best I can do is bring this to the transcoder team’s attention but suspect they’re waaaaaay ahead of me on this already. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have 4.0 in-hand 
Any updates on this? I’m planning to start building my library soon, and AV1 seems like a good format for keeping my storage needs to a minimum while also being future-proof for upcoming devices.
My NAS has a Ryzen 1200 so I’m fine with Plex doing on-the-fly transcoding for now until device support catches up; it just needs to be able to decode AV1 in order to read the files.
I am looking for an update on this also.
dav1d would probalby be the best decoder choice here. SSE3 asm improvements landed upstream recently that provide a very significant speed increase for 8bit video. so especially the next release will deliver a very reasonable decoding performance
looks like dav1d is about 9% slower than HEVC and 34% slower than h.264
Now that Netflix has been spreading the word on their SVT-AV1 encoder. Many people like myself are going to start wanting to encode via AV1. The time is now. SVT-AV1 is shaping up to be the favored encoder over rav1e and dav1d is still #1 on the decoder side. Please please please add dav1d support as soon as possible! Thanks.
It’s CLIENT devices that orchestrate what is supported and what is not. If a client device will directplay av1 (in any flavor) then it will direct play via plex (at least that’s my understanding). Plex uses whatever the client supports NATIVELY in its licensing agreements. That’s why HEVC still transcodes on PlayStation 4, because Sony has opted not to license HEVC on their PS4 Platform.
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It would be interesting to create some test encodes using SVT-AV1 and see if plex can already decode them (with the recent transcoder update).
probably not gonna happen with gpu, which mean some mega cpu processing power required.
There are only a handful of silicon manufacturers making hardware that will decode av1, and even less that support encoding.
The mobile market will determine av1’s success I think. Until the major phone/tablet manufacturers support av1 hardware decoding, there will be no way to really push the codec.
For now, av1 is in the domain of the power user with CPU cycles to spare, and a lot of time to experiment with encoding.
While that’s strictly true from a semantically best-practice perspective, it’s not technically true that something without hardware support can’t direct stream. If the SVT-AV1 decoder can be written into the player framework, as is part of the available repo thanks to the SVT and Netflix OSS teams, then you can put that burden on the client.
Now whether that’s going to be good for the client is debatable (that is, debatable until there’s been a good set of roadtests being done in the wild, after which it’s just empirical), but you definitely can do software decoding that can do the trick.
And this is a tack I would suggest the Plex devs take seriously, because with the global bandwidth exhaustion right now, being able to stream efficiently otw or ota is going to make the difference between make and break.
Of course, having said all that I do hope that hardware and firmware support from the likes of NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Apple and Sony (and any other stragglers) is delivered swiftly.
Uselessly using up bandwidth and compute resources should be considered an undue burden on server hosts and ISPs at this heightened time of streaming due to quarantines.
The problem there is Plex would then need to pay for streaming licenses for their clients rather than just their server. I spoke at length about this with a Plex employee, and that seems to be the hangup. I whole heartedly agree that if they build the decoder into the Plex app, things would work so much better, but that becomes very costly when dealing with licensing rights apparently.
You don’t pay for streaming licenses for AV1. It’s free and open source (aka FOSS). It’s not like HEVC or its FLOSS (free but limited open source software) counterpart x265, where there were costs, licensing and limits. Everything about AV1 is designed to improve all of that, the idea also being to leapfrog x265/HEVC entirely going forward.
Bear in mind that YouTube only created V8 outo of interest for having a streamlined alternative to all of the baggage of h264, unaware than HEVC/x265 was going to be a cost-driven codec, which is what led to the bolstering of the V9 codec, and why they, alongside other streaming giants, decided to put a huge collaborative effort into getting AV1 to be free and uniform.
v0v I only know what I was told, granted it was in regards to having software decoding for all supported codecs built into the app to maximize compatibility with current devices, rather than relying on device manufacturers to do the leg work. But, if AV1 is free, and there’s an encoder for it, you should maybe create a Feature request and let people vote on it, and hope that someone over at plex see’s the value in it. However, I have 0 content that is encoded in AV1, and I don’t think either of the 2 encoding softwares I use (StaxRip and Handbrake) have encoders for it… I could be wrong, never bothered to check… So, it might need to become a bit more wide before Plex actually does something about it honestly…
You’re right: conversion support is incredibly limited right now. FFMPEG only has it as experimental, but I believe are escalating efforts to stabilise and standardise it, so I suspect Handbrake et al will take similar measures.
But when there’s a chicken and egg standoff like this, the best solution is that all parties simply make all of the necessary efforts to address what they can.
The fact that Netflix has Android devices operational on AV1 is a warm advisory that it truly is ready for the market. And my Android devices are running 2x as fast in serving up Netflix compared to my Rokus (and it used to be that Netflix had a slight edge by the Rokus).
