Guide: NVDEC Hardware Acceleration Patch for Plex Media Server on Linux

[ChuckPa]

AFAIK (which I could be wrong) but HEVC encoding requires additional licensing which H.264 encoding does not.

[revr3nd]

@ChuckPa I think you are right there! I wouldn’t quote myself on this, but I believe H.264 is some sort of open source license where HEVC is not. Due to that, there is a much more limited ability to roll out HEVC by the Plex team

[ChuckPa]

Agreed. Imagine the cost increases / limitations if HEVC encoding where available but only to those licensed? From what I’ve read, those licenses aren’t cheap and I doubt (taking a wild guess) there isn’t any residual left in a PlexPass as it is to cover it.

Codecs are not cheap.

[TeknoJunky]

Unfortunate but thanks for taking the time to check.

@revr3nd

You can still request this be added as a feature, but I think it would be difficult to gain traction as HEVC in general takes much more processing to encode and is much more limited in what devices can consume direct HEVC streams.

There is already a request thread @ Transcode to HEVC/x265 which has decent support, but no doubt there are plenty other requests which haven’t been implemented either.

Edit there might be some use of a patch for the intel path for those with the appropriate igpu.