I wish there were some way to get the plex devs to work on newer codecs and not on worthless features like “discover”.
It’s feeling more and more like being stuck in the stone ages. We are using 20 year old codecs for transcoding and the most recent codecs supported are 10 years old. Here we are asking for support for a 3 year old codec and the only response we’ve seen is “This is too hard, stop asking”. Really not a good look for a product whose primary purpose is streaming video from home servers.
It’d be like a file system dev getting mad that we want better support for new hard drives because they are working on making virtual folders which connect to ibm storage buckets.
My wife had to come get me the other day because she thought Plex was broken. Instead, I found out that Plex hijacked the start up menu with a confusing dialogue for the new “discover” feature that neither of us wanted. It is so frustrating that Plex is spending dev hours on stupid gimmicks like “discover” instead of doing real heavy-lifting dev work to support an industry standard codec.
The “issues” seem to be that Plex doesnt want to spend any money on improving Plex unless it has a monetary gain they can show their new business investors
But you are right about their competitors having quite a few of the the now most requested features for Plex. Specifically, Emby has AV1 support , AMD APU support., and Google Home and Amazon Echo integration. Yet Plex has more money and resources and cant seem to get those things down. Even more sadly, there is already user support for Plex and Google Home where a single person was ablet to do it, yet Plex itself cannot seem to.
This is getting even more frustrating. Apparently building the plex players from source with stock plex servers enables AV1 support and plex is purposely disabling this option.
I just wanted to piggy back off this to mention a couple of things…
Plex has ffmpeg built-in to it and uses it for a great deal of things, right? ffmpeg is built with dav1d, and dav1d is the fastest software AV1 decoder out there. Why can’t they just allow the “Plex transcoder” to handle it? I just tried to play back 1080p AV1 with grain synthesis on the crustiest computer I still have access to: a dual core Ivy Bridge i3 machine. It worked fine…purely in software.
Furthermore, this raises a concern with how the transcoder would handle it, and is something I noticed with HEVC files. Say you have an HEVC 1080p 4 Mbps file that has to be transcoded because the player on the other end can’t handle it. For whatever reason, be it .ass or .pgs subtitles, lack of decode support on the device, anything. Plex isn’t savvy enough to bump the bitrate up and hardware transcodes it at 4 Mbps using AVC. Do you think that looks good? Spoiler alert: it does not. And the “Maximum” limit is the “original” bitrate, even though the format is changing.
Now apply that to AV1, where you could feasibly have 1 Mbps or even sub 1 Mbps animation that looks spectacular, if the source encode wasn’t made at the highest preset/speed. Plex, as it behaves now, would assume it ought to transcode to 1 Mbps using AVC, and even YouTube tends to use a bit more than that for 1080p AVC. It would look terrible.
Plex is built with ffmpeg, and ffmpeg can play anything. Seriously. If MPV or VLC can play it, then Plex (Server) technically can, and the only thing stopping it from working is Plex itself.
AMD and nVIDIA GPUs and even Intel GPUs have all support HEVC HW encode for quite some time now. Some of them even support VP9, and now they’re starting to support AV1. But Plex still transcodes to AVC whenever transcoding is needed, even if the playback device can handle any of the above codecs.
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Yes, that’s what we’re going to do. Unfortunately dav1d uses a build system which needs to be integrated into our CI/build system, and this has proven complicated.
This sounds like a different issue and highlights that Plex should set the transcoded quality limits based on the clients player settings, not the source media’s bitrate.
You’re right, the problem is how it decides what “Maximum” means, or at least what it shows you that means - and “Maximum” always means the source bitrate.
What’s ironic is it doesn’t matter whether or not I leave it at Maximum or try to force it to use 4 Mbps - the Dashboard always shows 3 Mbps.
With the extra irony being that Edge can technically play HEVC anyways, but Plex doesn’t think so:
And the extra extra irony - 99% of my transcoding being due to subtitles. There’s a more than competent JavaScript implementation of libass.
Still having to deal with transcoding because of subtitles in 2022 is ridiculous.
On that subject, Edge can also handle AC-3 and EAC-3 just fine - I’ve tested it with my own DASH manifests - HEVC + AC-3, AV1 + Opus, AVC + EAC-3. And again, Plex doesn’t think so.
But have you heard about our Lord and Saviour, Nicholas Cage?
How are you going to stick “Cage Rage” in my face and not have The Rock or Face/Off?
I’ve lost track of my point. HEVC is old hat at this point, and look at how Plex handles it. SubStation Alpha subtitles have been a thorn in my side since I started using Plex, and look at how Plex handles that. I don’t have high hopes for Plex and AV1, but I would absolutely love to be proven wrong!!! Before VVC or AV2 or the next big thing make AV1 irrelevant…
