currently I am running a Haswell Core i3 and 8 Gigs of Ram. It runs 1080p streams very good, but I will buy a 4K TV soon.
So I want to store my Media in 4k from now on. But I still want to be able to watch my media on the go or when I am at a friends house. For that it needs to be transcoded. The current i3 is not capable of that.
The new Intel Kaby Lake get Hardware encoding support, so I am thinking about buying a i7 7700k then.
It will feature full 10 Bit-HEVC Encoding and Decoding-Support. Will plex support that?
The full encoding support should drop the load a lot for the transcode? Or am I wrong?
How many streams at once? 4K requires 4x the bitrate throughput processing that 1080p does as well as much more-demanding codecs. Most people can’t afford the hardware to support the number of streams they want, if such hardware even exists.
And more importantly: how big is your TV and how close to it will you be?
The ugly truth is that 4K is kind of a gimmick like 3D was. Luckily consumers finally caught on to the 3D scam and it’s dying out… 4K is just at the beginning of that same cycle.
I guess there will be max. of 2 4k Streams at once, probably only one with transcoding since i will buy a roku4 that supports direct play for the TV. It will be a 55" and I will sit there realtivly close.
I saw a 4k TV with 4k Content next to a Full HD TV with Full HD content…there nothing like a gimmick like 3D was. The Quality of the PIcture is so much better, the details and sharpness. I was impressed.
Also alot of older Content stays Full HD for now, so i hope a 4k and 1080p transcoding would be possible. I might go for a Xeon then with 8 Cores and 16 Threads? Or will Plex use the Hardware encoding of the Kaby Lake CPU’s?
I just cannot buy the 4k as simply a gimmick. This is particularly true with HDR content, but even regular 4k content vs 1080p content is obvious on my set (60") at 8’. Is it necessary? No. Is 1080p enough? Yes. But, the difference is obvious for 4k source material.
However, streaming 4k is a gimmick as far as I am concerned. Too much compression to do any good and HEVC is not quite there yet. For many people in the US, the upstream bandwidth will not support >1 streaming session anyway (and many will also not allow streaming from a service due to crap speeds).
With an i3 or Xeon cpu, you shouldn’t have to worry about transcoding a 4K stream if your media player can handle it also (whether it’s an independent device or smart TV). Same goes for streaming 1080p; ie, set AppleTV4 to 1080p display and even an atom cpu has no issues --BUT set the same AppleTV4 to 720p display and your cpu will be pegged transcoding from 1080p to 720p on the fly. That’s been my experience with a Synology NAS + AppleTV4 combo.
@drinehart said:
I just cannot buy the 4k as simply a gimmick. This is particularly true with HDR content, but even regular 4k content vs 1080p content is obvious on my set (60") at 8’.
60" at 8’ is a size/distance combination where you could actually start to see the difference between 4K and 1080p if your vision is perfect. But at this point other considerations come into play, like aesthetics: I won’t ever put such a giant screen in my living room so close to my couch, I should set up a dedicated “movie” room
Anyway for the clear difference you can see, the real comparison should not be 1080p vs 4k sources viewed on a 60" 4k display, but 1080p signal and 4k signals watched on same size native resolution displays. In my experience where 720p (or even SD) was compared to 1080p on smaller screens, the lower resolution suffered a lot because of the bad upscale algorithms. Maybe the high pixel count of 4K will be good to solve the upscaling problems
I agree that HDR is cool, but it’s not the same as 4K, HDR is a real advantage, a really useful feature as long as you have an HDR screen. Compared to the improvement related to HDR, the improvement of 4K is risible…
For me there is improvement with 4k and HDR, so I will use it I dont want this thread to be a discussion about 4k vs 1080p :-D. I need and answer if plex makes use of the hardware encoding with 4k.
PMS doesn’t support any hardware-based transcoding except on the nVidia Shield TV. Plex says that “transcoding 4K content is a very intensive process and will require a powerful computer running Plex Media Server”.
My dual Xeon octo-core workstation just managed one 4K/HEVC transcoding on-the-fly so I think it fair to say that there’s no where for PMS to go but up with regard to improvement in that area.
@dduke2104 said:
PMS doesn’t support any hardware-based transcoding except on the nVidia Shield TV. Plex says that “transcoding 4K content is a very intensive process and will require a powerful computer running Plex Media Server”.
I missed the post that they are testing hardware transcoding. I’ll have to try this on my 2500k running at stock speeds with a Nvidia 760. What does your Xeon setup have as a GPU?
So did anyone test hw-transcoding with Kaby Lake already?! I’m asking I’d like to get a NUC because the SHIELD as PMS is not really useable at the moment and my Synology 716+ lacks power when it comes to transcoding.
Presumably if you care about 4K, you care about video quality.
If you care about video quality, you shouldn’t be depending on hardware transcoding. The quality is notably lower and you are trading even more quality-for-speed than you were before with just transcoding to begin with.
For some PMS platforms, HW transcoding is going to be the only way to get any transcoding at all.
But, yeah, if maximum image quality (or minimal loss of same) is your goal then HW transcoding is a step in the wrong direction. You need to continue with Plex Optimize or separate use of something like Handbrake.
@sremick said:
Presumably if you care about 4K, you care about video quality.
If you care about video quality, you shouldn’t be depending on hardware transcoding. The quality is notably lower and you are trading even more quality-for-speed than you were before with just transcoding to begin with.
Agree on all counts, but my love for picture quality doesn’t mean I require the same level for users I share with… As long as they get access to my media, they should thank me
I dont want this thread to be a discussion about 4k vs 1080p :-D. I need and answer if plex makes use of the hardware encoding with 4k.
