Guidance on "Enable HEVC video Encoding"

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Just seeking some guidance from the hive mind about “Enable HEVC video Encoding (experimental)” in PMS on MacOS (Mac Studio M1).

My gut feeling, assuming all transcode can be accommodated in hardware, is that leaving as H264 might be more efficient in hardware (less CPU load / heat / etc) than HEVC. However HEVC would deliver far efficient bitrates (less bandwidth per stream).

Understand this is really a more nuanced discussion, with quite a few variables including hardware dependencies, max number of streams supported in hardware and how many streams are actually needed.

Thank you in advance for helping to improve my knowledge and understanding

Hardware = Mac Studio M1 Max 32GB RAM (cores 8 performance / 2 efficiency / supports HW H.264, HEVC and has video de/encode & two prores encode/decode engines…whatever that means)
O/S = Sequoia 15.6.1

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Your server hardware supports HEVC hardware transcoding. I recommend you enable it until you run into problems with clients not supporting it. If both codecs are accelerated, differences in power consumption are negligible. CPU cyles are not used at all as hardware acceleration means that a dedicated chip is used instead of the main CPU processor cores.

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