Hi all,
I have been fighting with Plex for a long time to be able to use my PS4 as the only client in my living room to play movies, series etc… Had to give up and revert to Kodi on a PC in my living room (ouch Waf went very low that day :* ). But my goal was always to be able to use the PS4 as the one and only access point to all media.
Couldn’t achieve this with Plex, too many buffering issues, unexpected transcoding, had a huge MKV ripped library, with no clarity on what to reencode to for ps4 plex compatibility. Very frustrating over the years to see such a good looking and powerful product as Plex and not be able to use it.
My PMS is hosted on a raspberry pi 3 for convenience reasons
I have a huge library of ripped movies from m DVD/BLu Ray collection, all ripped during pas years with MakeMKV, all with subtitle tracks, nothing the Plex server can handle without transcoding for the PS4.
→ Issue is the Raspberry simply cannot handle transcoding without massive buffering. And optimizing is not an option (not easy for the family members to select which version to select for playback, and I don’t want to sacrifice quality, prefer to directly reencode to a high quality supported format).
I was left with only one solution (given that I will not come back to a PC or anything else for a server, I like my small raspberry sitting hidden and silent in a corner 
) : rip all new BluRays and DVDs to a format that will Directplay/Directstream on the PS4, and re-encode all existing MKVs to this new format.
After a number of tests with Handbrake to reencode my multi-audio/multi-subs MKVs with little success (transcoding occurs again and again), I figured out that I couldn’t have any soft subs if I wanted to avoid transcoding. So no more multi subs, need to burn in the subs while encoding.
This defeats the purpose of having several audio channels (for example, if I want to have both english and french channels for a kids movie (yes I confess I am French), then I cannot burn-in the subs anymore as French subs will always appear, even when the French audio is playing…)
So basically, it comes down to :
- Only 1 audio channel (French) for kids movie
- Only 1 audio channel (original version) + burnt-in subs for other movies
On a technical side, for audio, after many attempts with ac3/dts passthrough, I decided to convert the audio streams to AAC 5.1.
For video H264, high profile, level 4.1 was working fine with Handbrake. constant quality set at 20.
Basically, I finally had perfectly encoded movies in MP4 container, playing in DIrectPLay in the PS4, perfect setup, good quality, easy to use for all members of the family through the great Plex interface.
Problem : Handbrake took hours to reencode the movies to MP4…and with a huge library to process, this simply cannot be done. I am on Macbook Pro as my main encoding machine, and unfortunatlely Handbrake cannot handle the Intel QSV hardware acceleration in the Mac version (it does in the WIndows version, go figure…), so no speed improvement to be expected there…
So I reverted to trying all possible free/non-free encoders/converters on the Mac. Any Video Converter, Mac X converter, Total Converter, MPEG Streamclip, AVIDemux, etc etc
All slow and results were almost always worse than HandBrake in terms of quality. Except for MAC X Video converter pro, which seems to be the only one to take advantage of the QSV hardware acceleration and produce perfect quality files (although profile cannot be chosen (main is always used for what I have seen so far) and Level is always 4.0 it seems) with good encoding speed.
I encoded high quality MP4s from blurays and DVDs in a very reasonable amount of time, with burnt in subs, audio conversion to AAC 5.1. AND these all play in Directplay on my PS4. B)
I finally bought the MAC X pack (including Video converter pro and ripper pro) and ripping DVDs to MP4s with those nice PS4 compliant settings is now a straightforward process.
I want to precise that am not here to advocate this product more than any other (to each his own), but just to share my user point of view, as I spent, like lots of you, an awful amount of time testing, complaining on transcoding issues, buffering etc… This is the solution that works best for me, I can queue encodings and leave it running for hours. Quite efficient.
Now, the main remaining complaint for the Plex side 
- No way to use SRT : I am still hoping to be able to add a srt file besides my video files in the future. For now, if any srt is present and selected, PLEX PS4 gives an error message (well known issue on the forum since a long time it seems, still unsolved).
All in all, I may finally be able to enjoy all my movies on the PS4 via the great Plex (well…reencoding all the MKVs will sure take time), and it will allow me to simplify the living-room setup (getting rid of the Kodi PC there, simplifying Harmony remote activities for PS4 only etc).
I am betting on a high WAF this time guys
If anyone is interested, I can post the details of the parameters I use in Mac X Video Converter for generating the Plex PS4 compatible MP4s as well as the full report for the generated MP4 file structure from Media Inspector (with all bitrates, profiles, levels, formats…)
Sorry for a long post, only my second post here, but it is a real relief to finally have found a working solution, wanted to share with others.
Ciao
