For ease of tracking I have added a known issues section on the top level post
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I have an old HDHR EXTEND, and I do not like the quality of the transcoder on the model I have, so I have it disabled. However I would like to try this, but it appears that when you have an HDHR EXTEND, the experimental plex transcoding option isn’t available.
Is there a way around this?
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Pretty surprised this happened for HEVC over AV1! Glad to see a major feature request has been added.
Would love to see some documentation posted after the public release covering what hardware options are supported for HEVC. I’m not super clear on certain things about the different encoders out there. Like my kaby lake i7 has 10 bit HEVC encoding support, but only at 4:2:0 subsampling I think. Will that work? Clear CPU and GPU support lists would be a big deal for people working on easy mode like me.
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@vertigo235 HDHR EXTEND is a tv tuner. HEVC transcoding depends on your GPU, which GPU do you have selected? That being said unless you have transcoding enabled under dvr settings you are likely recording at original quality and there isn’t much plex can do to improve it.
@itsamezachary due to various reasons (licensing, cpu load, ect) any new codecs will likely be HW only. There are many more GPUs that support HEVC than AV1 so we tackled that first. However when I added support I made it easily extendable to new codecs so it won’t take anywhere near as much effort to add av1.
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@tree2369 when you say “live tv” do you mean from a tv tuner or from one of plex’s live tv channels?
Correct, I reference this guide… https://support.plex.tv/articles/225877347-live-tv-dvr/
Basically if you have an HDHR EXTEND, plex only allows you to use the built in encoder, but for other HDHR devices that do not have a built in encoder you can use Plex to transcode your live streams.
I would like to use the Plex transcoder for my HDHR EXTEND which has a really terrible encoder built in (it’s the original version that wasn’t even called the HDHR EXTEND).
ah, I can file an issue for that but there is no guarantee when we will get to it. when you reference the experimental feature do you mean to “enable HEVC encoding” or the “convert video while recoding” feature. just an FYI, “convert video while recoding” only applies to DVR recordings not to live streams.
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Yes, just the convert video while recording, I don’t use the HDHR encoder at all currently but I would be interested in transcoding using HEVC.
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My FireTV sticks don’t tonemap while connected to SDR displays. (on Ubuntu server)
I can confirm issue reported by @neoeinstein with Dovi files on AndroidTV\Shield clients. However, I am running a Windows based Plex server. Disabling Dovi from the client OS works well as a standard HDR transcode.
When direct playing or while transcoding? And which Fire TV Stick?
Local Tonemapping is known to be broken an Fire TV 4K Max Gen1. Does Plex transcode to SDR or maybe to HDR (which then fails to tonemap locally)?
The 3rd gen HD and the 4k Gen 1.
Both are connected to a sdr 1080p display and hdr is set to off on the stick.
It seems also on direct play it plays hdr non tone mapped. But with convert automatically it formed the sticks to tone map.
Now when I select a lower resolution than 4k it will transcode HEVC non tone mapped.
I guess the original proplem is the not working of the client side tone mapping / plex not knowing the firestick has Hdr set to off.
But the h264 transcode to force it to tone map does not work with HEVC transcode.
@menzo2003 correct, tone mapping is not compatible with HEVC transcodes
Chris, does this mean that the plex client app will not properly tonemap on SDR devices at all?
I’m thinking non-Pro iPad devices, which are SDR, or the number of 1080p Roku or FireTV televisions that do not have HDR support in the device OS itself.
Thanks
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Just answered my own question (probably). Had an open chance to just test it with the current PlexPass beta build (not the alpha build discussed here) and it seems to still just use SW libx264 on DVR recordings. As an FYI, I’m using an HDHR Prime in ClearQAM mode.
/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder -codec:0 mpeg2video -live_start_index 0 -probesize 20000000 -i http://127.0.0.1:32400/livetv/sessions/d0e4733b-4615-431c-972f-0a4b26b40207/e5c265c3-83bd-4d32-870d-cc652ec7863a/index.m3u8?offset=-1.000000&X-Plex-Token= -filter_complex [0:0]yadif[0];[0]scale=w=1920:h=1080:force_divisible_by=4[1];[1]format=pix_fmts=yuv420p|nv12[2] -map [2] -codec:0 libx264 -crf:0 16 -r:0 29.969999999999999 -preset:0 veryfast -x264opts:0 subme=0:me_range=4:rc_lookahead=10:me=hex:8x8dct=0:partitions=none -map 0:1 -metadata:s:1 language=eng -codec:1 copy -copypriorss:1 0 -map 0:2 -metadata:s:2 language=spa -codec:2 copy -copypriorss:2 0 -f mpegts -map_metadata -1 -map_chapters -1 /media/TV/.grab/319cd792d493c27d301370ed1f338473ff4e9e61-bd9691f3a6f6d9ffc87c8574828023034032e586/Daytime Columbus (2008) - 2024-09-17 12 30 00 - Daytime Columbus.ts -y -nostats -loglevel quiet -loglevel_plex error -xioerror -progressurl http://127.0.0.1:32400/video/:/transcode/session/e5c265c3-83bd-4d32-870d-cc652ec7863a/ca0ffc86-1537-42d7-ac9d-7d5e4e7d1997/progress
I guess on the good side is I’m using an Alder Lake i5-12400 which is barely being loaded by the transcode process. Showing around ~100% usage on the process on a 12 thread CPU and this is with a 1080i incoming feed.
Still would be nice to have proper HW transcoding (with HEVC) though. Especially given currently it’s just doing h264 and would still cause Tdarr to run another step to do HEVC. Not even worth keeping in its current state. I’ll be patiently waiting for this to hit PlexPass users and give it another go then in hopes the previous wording is true and we’ll see the GPU finally being used for DVR transcoding. 
Ok, so it is a firetv problem that it tells plex that it can play HDR files with it clearly can’t/is bugged.
@dklein any devices which don’t support tonemapping will likely not support HEVC and thus a h.264 transcode will be used (which will tonemap)
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I would say thats probably an unlikely assumption. A very popular exception being the Fire Stick 4K Max Gen1 as already pointed out.
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@pommesmatte I will investigate
