H.264 Maximum Level for various TVs

General Discussions
1

I’m finding a lot of conflicting information on what the H.264 Maximum Level should be set to for smart TVs running Plex natively. Hardware details are below. I’m mostly playing ripped/compressed BR movies and live TV Comcast feed through a SiliconDust HDHomeRun. I just recently found the settings to allow the clients to play a higher quality. My server can easily transcode, but I want the highest quality that will work. The Plex client on all my devices indicates 4.1 is the recommended setting for the max H.264 level. Is there a definitive resource/guide to tell you what hardware can handle what level? What does setting it to automatic do? This post says I should be able to set my TCL TVs at 5 or 5.1. https://forums.roku.com/viewtopic.php?t=116558
Is there any more info on this topic? Thanks!

Server: Dell OptiPlex 5060 i7-8700 CPU
TCL 4K gigabit wired TVs
TCL 4K wireless TVs (wired when I have time to get it done)
2014 LG 1080P WebOS wireless TVs (wired when I have time to get it done)

2

When encoding an h264 video, you can specify what profile level to use. Think of it like version numbers for the encoder. The higher the level, the more feature it has, but you need newer equipment to play these back properly. It’s hard to find the published info on this from a device. The Plex app will try to detect what your TV can support, that’s what automatic does. You can override this and use whatever setting you want. In most cases files are encoded using a level that is higher than really needed, so playing back that file is fine in these cases. However, if a file truly needed that higher profile level to support something, and your TV can’t actually handle that level, then you get problems.

3

Thanks. Does the automatic setting usually work pretty well? If so, I will go with that and see how it works.

4

It should since it’s detecting what the device reports. Whether the device reports correctly or not is another issue.