Clarify h.265 support for me please

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I am thinking about switching my h.264 library to h.265. I am not talking about 4K!!

I am not looking for debates about which one is better. I am switching if it fulfills certain criteria.

I want my library to be 1080p h.265. Reasons are space saving and bandwidth usage. Quality comes second.

I always use subtitles. Before going ahead and investing in a Quadro P2000 I have some questions:

  1. Does plex direct play/stream h.265 with subtitles or does it have to transcode to h.264?

  2. Do certain containers perform better/worse? I am looking at mkv with ac3 audio and srt external subtitles.

  3. Under what circumstances will transcoding to h.264 be required/forced? Provided that clients are h.265 capable (smart TVs, mainly Samsung and Android TV OS boxes), what could cause the server to transcode and hence negate the lower bandwidth usage advantage?

  4. What is your experience, if any, with h.265 media and support? Any success/failure stories?

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My experience: It depends on the capabilities of the client.

LG B7 OLED w/ Plex SmartTV client
Direct plays H.265 video + AAC/AC3/dts audio.
However:
With PGS or VOBSUB subtitles enabled, the video transcodes.
With audio = direct play and SRT subs enabled, video direct plays
With audio = transcode and SRT subs enabled, video transcodes.

Nvidia Shield w/ Plex Android TV client
Direct plays video with PGS/VOBSUB/SRT subtitles.
Not sure what happens when audio transcodes. Shield is connected to Denon receiver that supports all audio tracks found on DVDs/Bluray (in my collection anyway). It is very rare for any audio to be transcoded.

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@plexchalk the best person to answer your question is YOU.

convert a handful of videos to x265 (don’t delete the originals!)

then play test them on YOUR clients

test them locally, test them remotely, test them with different bandwidth limits.

test them with subtitles on and off.

only until you have satisfied YOURSELF with your experiments, will you be able to decide what is best for YOU.

This also applies to the conversion settings, there are always trade offs between quality, speed and size.

only YOU can decide what LOOKS good enough, is SMALL enough, and takes an appropriate/acceptable amount of TIME to convert.

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Love my Denon. A far better device than my previous Yamaha.

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