Clarification please - do you need Plex Pass for simple hardware decoding on IOS devices?
I only recently noticed my M1 iPad battery life was terrible on HEVC content and with a little testing observed a distinct difference vs nplayer lite via DLNA.
I never thought I needed Plex Pass because all my content direct plays and the plex pass feature set really only specifically mentions hardware acceleration in terms of transcoding - not decoding. At best the wording is lacking specificity.
Hardware transcoding is purely for making sure the server can use hardware (dedicated graphics card) to transform (transcode) the video if a client requests it. If your clients direct play a file, the server does not need to do anything, and all decoding is done locally on the device. Having a Plex Pass - or not - won’t affect the performance of your clients if the file viewed is the same.
A Plex Pass COULD potentially help your iPad survive longer, if you could trigger a transcode from your iPad. The server will be forced to transcode the video on-the-fly to a simpler-to-decode format that shoud not stress the iPad (in theory). A Plex Pass would then let your server use the less intense hardware transcoding instead of CPU. However, if your server is beefy enough that it can do it in software (CPU) just fine, then no Pass is necessary.
I’m not sure how you could trigger a transcode. I thought there was a setting to disallow direct-play, but I am not seeing it in my Windows client, nor in server settings… If you can force a transcode by requesting a lower quality video, then you could test it out now to see how well the server can handle transcoding in software.
Well that’s not really the answer I was hoping for. My files do not need transcoding, which means either there is a bug in the IOS client on iPad relating to hardware decoding or the IOS client on iPad is seriously inferior to nplayer at this point in time.
But I guess it’s nice to know Plex Pass won’t change anything - I’ll just pay the 5 bucks for the add-free version of nplayer and use that as my client on ipad.
It would be nice though if Plex confirmed visually that it was using hardware decoding - Nplayer gives you that visual indicator as part of its mechanism that lets you specify either hardware or software decoding during playback.
It’s possible… If this nPlayer app is using modern API, it’s likely much more efficiency on the apple silicon, than iOS plex app that is build on pre ios14 API that Apple deprecated years ago.
Adding plexpass will not improve this.
