H.265/HEVC, FLAC, ALAC support test period (round 2)

I can pay via DLNA or USB after Xbox update

“We’re also interested to know how well the app handles 4K videos.”

What do you mean exactly?

Is Xbox One able to playback 4K videos and display them @ 3840x2160?
I don’t have a 4K TV yet so I’m asking basically if Xbox One can output 4K and Plex can support 4K movies in 3840x2160.

@murdof said:
“We’re also interested to know how well the app handles 4K videos.”

What do you mean exactly?

Is Xbox One able to playback 4K videos and display them @ 3840x2160?
I don’t have a 4K TV yet so I’m asking basically if Xbox One can output 4K and Plex can support 4K movies in 3840x2160.

Xbox One does not support 4k output so I don’t know what the hell they are on about!

Bumpity bump… Any more news on this front? Have things improved at all on MS’ side?

Would like confirmation if this feature is currently enabled or not

I can confirm that Media Player App, plays the following HEVC file streamed from Plex DLNA just fine, so it would seem Microsoft have HEVC support since Nov update.

VIDEO 
ID : 1 
Format : HEVC 
Format/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding 
Format profile : Main@L4@Main 
Codec ID : hev1 
Codec ID/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding 
Duration : 21mn 32s 
Bit rate : 2 290 Kbps 
Width : 1 916 pixels 
Height : 1 066 pixels 
Display aspect ratio : 16:9 
Frame rate mode : Variable 
Frame rate : 23.976 fps 

AUDIO
ID : 2 
Format : AC-3 
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3 
Mode extension : CM (complete main) 
Format settings, Endianness : Big 
Codec ID : ac-3 
Duration : 21mn 32s 
Bit rate mode : Constant 
Bit rate : 384 Kbps 
Channel(s) : 6 channels 
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE 
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz 
Bit depth : 16 bits 
Compression mode : Lossy 
Stream size : 59.2 MiB (14%) 

Same file in PLEX App, had momentary pauses and did not play as expected

@ozblogger said:
Would like confirmation if this feature is currently enabled or not
Moussa.uk re-disabled direct playback of HEVC on the xbox one app so it is not currently enabled.
I will be disabling HEVC support now, you may need to restart the app for the changes to take hold.

Same file in PLEX App, had momentary pauses and did not play as expected
It sounds like your server was not able to keep up with the transcoding of the HEVC.

Xbox one playing 4K?

Bump, Yes, the Xbox November 2015 update, updated the console’s OS to be based on the Windows 10 core. Windows 10 has direct play support for HEVC/H.265 within an MKV container.

I have both Plex Media Server, and Emby installed on my Windows 10 PC, and Emby can push (via DLNA) HEVC/H.265 encoded MKV files with no transcoding.

Please can someone at Plex re-enable the H.265 support in the Xbox One app, and also not just for MP4 containers. All of my HD videos are H.265 encoded in an MKV container.

P.S. The only two things I wish for in the Xbox One app is H.265 direct play support (as above), and also for the Xbox One app to support multiple managed users. I have setup my wife, and kids, but of course on the Xbox One app I cannot sign my kids in using their managed account so my 7 yr old daughter can see things that are above her age (I make sure she only chooses PG’s)

Thanks Plex,

Keep up the good work!

Micro666

@Micro666 said:
Bump, Yes, the Xbox November 2015 update, updated the console’s OS to be based on the Windows 10 core. Windows 10 has direct play support for HEVC/H.265 within an MKV container.

I have both Plex Media Server, and Emby installed on my Windows 10 PC, and Emby can push (via DLNA) HEVC/H.265 encoded MKV files with no transcoding.

Please can someone at Plex re-enable the H.265 support in the Xbox One app, and also not just for MP4 containers. All of my HD videos are H.265 encoded in an MKV container.

P.S. The only two things I wish for in the Xbox One app is H.265 direct play support (as above), and also for the Xbox One app to support multiple managed users. I have setup my wife, and kids, but of course on the Xbox One app I cannot sign my kids in using their managed account so my 7 yr old daughter can see things that are above her age (I make sure she only chooses PG’s)

Thanks Plex,

Keep up the good work!

Micro666

Yes, please dictate the direction of someone else’s software development. They obviously disabled it for a reason.

danjames92,

Err not sure why you gave that response, If you’d read this thread you’d see that yes, they did disable HEVC/H.265 support on the Xbox One app for a reason.

That reason was because the last time they enabled it was before the Xbox One was updated in Nov 15, with the Windows 10 core.

Prior to Nov 15, the Xbox One didn’t support playback of HEVC/H.265 content, but since Nov 15 you can direct playback HEVC/H.265 content, so hence I was simply asking for them to turn the support back on so that we can test again for compatibility.

Currently the Xbox One can direct playback HEVC/H.265 context in an MKV container, using DLNA from either Plex DLNA, or another DLNA server such as Emby.

I’d simply like Plex to turn the direct playback support back on, as I’m sure we’ll find that it now works fine. At least for the video side of things. DTS may still be an issue, but transcoding the audio stream, and direct streaming the video is much better than what happens at present where the whole lot is transcoded.

Micro666

@Micro666 said:
Prior to Nov 15, the Xbox One didn’t support playback of HEVC/H.265 content, but since Nov 15 you can direct playback HEVC/H.265 content, so hence I was simply asking for them to turn the support back on so that we can test again for compatibility.
HEVC was announced and added well before the November update, it just never worked correctly with the Plex App. The same thing happened with MKV support when it was released. It worked great over DLNA via the Media Player app but had all sorts of issues when using the App.

But with that being said, I did bring this up to the Developers again to try another test. Never really hurts to try again :wink:

Funny thing is HEVC/H.265 works fine with Emby DLNA and the Xbox One. I can push/pull HEVC/H.265 MKV content to the Xbox One with no issue.

If both Plex DLNA and Emby DLNA can direct stream HEVC/H.265 content without transcoding, then I’m sure Plex Media Server can too.

I’m not a developer on a Media Server platform, but I am a developer, and this should be possible. The Xbox One can play MKV HEVC content no issue.

All I’m asking for is the Plex team to re-enable it for testing, or as someone once suggested in this thread, add an option in the settings to turn on experimental HEVC support

@jmckee said:

But with that being said, I did bring this up to the Developers again to try another test. Never really hurts to try again :wink:

Indeed… it can’t hurt :slight_smile:

Hi all. Due to popular demand, and our infinite curiosity, we’re going to reenable a testing period for HEVC/h265 support within the XB1 app. You can find out details on how this works in the original post in this thread, but the TL;DR is:

You will need to restart the app after making sure it’s killed by highlighting the app from the Xbox One dashboard, pressing the menu button on your controller and selecting ‘Quit’.

This time around we’ve enabled direct play/stream support for the HEVC/h265 codec in both MP4 and MKV containers. The selected audio stream codec again must be either AAC or AC3 for DP support.

Please give us feedback on how your testing goes!

While I don’t have a lot of HEVC content, I was able to run my test files through the app successfully which Resulted in the following:
mp4/HEVC/aac - Direct Play
mkv/HEVC/aac - Direct Play

mp4/HEVC/AC3 - Direct Play
mkv/HEVC/AC3 - Direct Play

mkv/HEVC/2 AAC tracks - Direct Play for both tracks

mp4/HEVC/DTS - Transcode (h264/ac3)
mkv/HEVC/DTS - Transcode (h264/ac3)

Same results as jmckee thus far.

Will be trying more files as I convert for testing different combinations.

Hi Moussa,

Similar result here:

mkv/HEVC/AC3 - DirectPlay
mp4/HEVC/AC3 - DirectPlay

mkv/HEVC/DTS - Transcode (h.254/ac3)
mp4/HEVC/DTS - Transcode (h.254/ac3)

mkv/HEVC/DTSMA - Transcode (h.254/ac3)
mp4/HEVC/DTSMA - Transcode (h.254/ac3)

It’s great that the Plex app for Xbox One is now performing direct play of HEVC/AC3 encoded content, but also strange that HEVC/DTS or HEVC/DTSMA encoded content doesn’t use DirectStream mode, direct playing the HEVC stream, and transcoding the DTS audio track to AC3.

Unfortunately around 90% of my content is HEVC/DTS. Is this something that can be enabled easily, or would it require investigation and dev work to figure out?

Either way, love Plex!

Micro666

@Micro666 said:
Unfortunately around 90% of my content is HEVC/DTS. Is this something that can be enabled easily, or would it require investigation and dev work to figure out?

Going to take a little bit of tinkering to get working. I brought it up with Moussa earlier as well so it is something he can look at, but not sure how high of a priority it will be.

I believe it has to do with HLS streaming protocol that Plex uses when transcoding which normally uses an mpegts container. I don’t know if that supports the HEVC decoder (Or if they’re able to process the streams independent of the container)

Could they not use h.265 in the HLS stream so the video wouldn’t need to be transcoded?

@cayars said:
Could they not use h.265 in the HLS stream so the video wouldn’t need to be transcoded?

That I do not know, it is just my guess at what happened. And if it is something that simple I am sure it was just overlooked. And once Moussa has time I am sure he’ll look into it a bit more to find the exact cause.

(Hope that makes sense I’ve been messing with your auto-conversion script on my linux box and starting the process of converting most of my TV Show episodes so my brain is a little fried today)