I can confirm that today’s TestFlight for AppleTV does indeed force an h264 transcode with Apple TV HD allowing for compatibility with older devices. Thanks!
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Hi all, maybe dumb question,
I have latest download available on this page which is 9239, I have a notification that says " Plex Media Server 1.41.3.9276 is now available to Plex Pass users in the Beta update channel." do I not need to download from this page anymore and can do regular updates now ?
It doesn’t appear to have been merged into the Plex Pass version yet, you will need to wait until that happens before you switch if you wish to continue to have the HEVC support.
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HEVC encoding is only in the Forum Preview builds. It will be mentioned in the release notes when HEVC encoding is available in a beta build.
The last four digits of the PMS version relate only to when the build occurred. It has nothing to do with the content of the build. So, while 9276 was built after 9239, that in no way implies that 9276 contains all the features in 9239.
As far as when HEVC encoding will be available in beta/public releases, see this post (from earlier in the thread):
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Any updates to share? Its been pretty quite here lately.
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I think we are just waiting for a merge to the plex pass version, Chris said a few posts up that the work on the preview was done and that there wouldn’t be any more updates.
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I hope soon…
For me this is such a major feature, I’m going to stick with this version until it gets released!
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Just to clarify, all the code for this is in 1.41.3 so you wont see it in release notes. There is a switch on our end which will enable the functionslity and that will be flipped on our end when all clients are ready and product/marketing give the green light Unfortunetly i have no say over when that will be.
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The clients, from my experience, don’t like HEVC. It must be a lot of number crunching for the decoding hardware.
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If it’s not supported by the hardware then it will transcode to h264 instead.
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Which is probably where a lot of the work in the Plex clients is required. Coding in sufficient constraints to each client app so that the app recognises the hardware and what its limitations are. When you think about the number of different hardware variations amongst some environments this could be quite a task.
Right. “Supported” doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good at it. Could be on the encoding end as well.
Each client I tested had a different issue.
Bottom line is the entire user experience is not as smooth as H.264. This integration has a ways to go.
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Isn’t that what we already do with direct streaming files encoded in hevc?
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I haven’t updated since 9136 because of the whole database fiasco so I’m wondering if new builds are coming (now that v1.41.3 is out)? I mean it would’ve been nice if HEVC was a Preferences.xml-only feature (TranscoderHEVCEncoding="1" TranscoderHEVCOptimize="0") until it’s ready so we can continue using it while also getting the latest features. But it is indeed possible to use it (by replacing h264_vaapi with hevc_vaapi in the Transcoder) while on the latest version.
Once that feature has been enabled by the Plex team to permit it to be shown up in the settings that is ( just clarifying it for people to prevent a flood of I don’t see that option posts 
)
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Where is this located?
You’ll need to “hack” Plex Transcoder for that. But it’s probably better to just stay on 1.41.2.9239 and wait until either the feature gets activated or Chris drops a new build.
If you did swap h264_vaapi with hevc_vaapi then would that mean that clients which are H264 only wouldn’t be able to receive transcoded content?
Yeah but I don’t have any such clients (except Chromium but who watches movies in a web browser?).
