Under the dome S1E01 1080p Q=21.5 AVC : 2.66 GB
Under the dome S1E01 1080p Q=21.5 HEVC : 1.60 GB
MPC-HC and VLC support decoding. Still not convinced ?
I'm not sure what you are trying to convince us of. no one said it doesn't make a decent file size or that a couple players everyone knows are always on the cutting edge don't support it.
It just seems that few people are reluctant to a quick HEVC support in plex, because of their poor hardware or the fear of change or whatever bad reason.
This is quite surprising, as noone will force them to use it ... If you don't need HEVC support, just post your useless comments anywhere else.
It just seems that few people are reluctant to a quick HEVC support in plex, because of their poor hardware or the fear of change or whatever bad reason.
This is quite surprising, as noone will force them to use it ... If you don't need HEVC support, just post your useless comments anywhere else.
Some people are posting a different view on it to educate people that use the forum to learn stuff. Their opinion is important as well in that sense. In this case for example it is easy to think that it should be a no-brainer to build in HEVC now now now. But when they have read this thread they realise that there is an opposing view that is fairly reasonable (IMO).
And do not forget that every development hour spent on one thing means one hour less on a thing they might deem more important. So that might be a reason why they feel a need to voice their view on it.
Under the dome S1E01 1080p Q=21.5 AVC : 2.66 GB
Under the dome S1E01 1080p Q=21.5 HEVC : 1.60 GB
MPC-HC and VLC support decoding. Still not convinced ?
HEVC is the future. I don't believe anyone is denying that (unless VP9 gains traction). However, even the developers of x265 will freely admit that this is bleeding edge stuff.
If you compare the "Q=21.5" encodes in your example, you'll see that x265 has blurred the encode more than x264. You could probably get similar perceived quality at a similar bit-rate with x264 by turning on some of its more advanced features, stronger noise filtering, and targeting a slightly lower quality. It's a known issue that surely will be resolved as x265 matures and more HEVC features are implemented, but, for now, x265 and x264 encodes are not apple to apple comparisons because x265 is still under heavy development.
HEVC, and even x265 in its current state, do shine in bit rate constrained environments, like watching Plex content remotely, where HEVC is able to mask compression artifacts more than AVC. But the Plex clients that would easily benefit from this (Tablets, phones, chromecast, Roku, browsers, etc.) don't support HEVC, and won't any time soon. It could currently only be effectively used by full PC clients -- clients that are, for the most part, not as often used as remote clients. For all the rest, the content would need to be converted to AVC. You would be far better off encoding with x264 from the start, where you could let x264 spend more time on a quality low bit rate encode.
The future is now : (software) encoding and decoding are now widely available !
Encoding and decoding are two separate things. Encoders will evolve a lot, I have no doubt about that.
But we are talking here about decoding HEVC in plex. I'm pretty sure the decoding stuff will not change that much from now, as decoding is always much easier than encoding.
Talking about mobile devices lacking of HEVC hardware support is pointless, because plex can (could) transcode HEVC into AVC when needed, or even stream video. And also because using plex on mobile devices is funny but only an option among many others.
BTW: the video I've encoded is very sharp, and the decoding with MPC-HC is hardware accelerated (nvidia GPU).
I'll quote my post on why this discussion is moot.
Either way, this won't happen until the FFmpeg library in Plex is updated to a build that supports h265. And that likely won't happen for a while because XBMC (which Plex is a fork of) hasn't updated to support h265 yet. They did attempt to a few weeks ago, but they aborted when they encountered a severe memory leak with the new FFmpeg build. It's a lot more work than just dropping in a new build and expecting nothing to break. They're going to try again in the next major release and, if successful, it will eventually find its way downstream to Plex.
Yes h265 will eventually supercede h264 but not anytime soon. The x265 encoder/decoder is still very young, so it's curently computionally expensive to encode/decode h265 streams. And there won't be hardware support for the codec until late this year or early next so streaming to practically every device will require transcoding.
It's not even upto Plex when HEVC support is implemented.
I'd appreciate a "Lab"/"Beta" function for HEVC, h.265 decoding :)
...me, too :rolleyes:
I was looking at some XBMC wikis and came across this. Thought it had some relevance to this thread…
1 Support in XBMC
XBMC v12.3 “Frodo” and the upcoming XBMC v13 “Gotham” do not support HEVC encoded videos. Attempting to play HEVC encoded material will result in a black screen with only audio playing.
Assuming all goes well, the first stable version of XBMC with HEVC support will most likely be v14.
2 Support in FFmpeg
The FFmpeg maintainers included support for the proposed version of the HEVC decoder in FFmpeg version 2.1.
This version of FFmpeg is not in use in the most recent builds of XBMC and, since we are not allowing any more new features to go in to v13 ‘Gotham’ development (we are in feature freeze), this feature will not make it into XBMC 13.0. We are, of course, planning to upgrade FFmpeg to a higher version but this will happen after 13.0 has been released.
3 Planning
A first test to upgrade the internal FFmmpeg to the latest version resulted in a severe memory leak which caused 16GB of memory usage within 20 minutes. Obviously these issues need to be resolved before you will see a version with FFmpeg 2.1, and there are developers working on it, but the main focus at this point in time is on releasing XBMC 13.0 ‘Gotham’
By the time the HEVC encoder is finalised and people start using it widely there will be support for it in XBMC, but at this moment we are not there yet. Therefore the best suggestion is to avoid using this encoder for the moment if you intend to play your creations with XBMC.
4 Hardware acceleration
There are very few hardware video decoding options out on the market right now, which means that any HEVC decoding, XBMC or not, will require a fairly recent and powerful desktop-class processor.
Just thought I would throw out there that I did 2 test encodes from 1080p movies that were 9gb and 10gb and the results were 1.8 and 1.9gb. So even using it with 1080p it is a huge size difference especially when I already have to use a 20tb nas to hold my collection, I could cut that down at the very least in half if sizes were to start varying much.
Just thought I would throw out there that I did 2 test encodes from 1080p movies that were 9gb and 10gb and the results were 1.8 and 1.9gb. So even using it with 1080p it is a huge size difference especially when I already have to use a 20tb nas to hold my collection, I could cut that down at the very least in half if sizes were to start varying much.
If you want to play h265 files already with Plex you might want to try out Plexmbc together with one of the nightly builds of XMBC 14 (Helix) which include already FFmpeg 2.2: the few files I have in this format play fine on my setup with it.
For Plex itself this probably means that users have to wait until XMBC moves on officially to Helix and Plex will follow shortly after.
For Plex itself this probably means that users have to wait until XMBC moves on officially to Helix and Plex will follow shortly after.
Not very familiar with this stuff so I apologize in advance. But does plex HAVE to wait for XBMC? They can't just jump ahead into advanced technological awesomeness?
AFAIK PMS can already handle and direct play h265 content but not transcode. There are no official Plex-clients that can play this content natively yet.
Since the transcoder is based on ffmpeg we have to wait until this component will be updated. FFmpeg 2.2 is out already with H265 support.
Once this version will have been included into PMS we will also see h265 support in PMS and we will be able to play this content (transcoded) on all clients.
PHT has it’s own build in coreplayer, the so called dvdplayer which comes from XBMC (don’t know how much Plex is partecipating in the developing of the player itself). Plex is originally a forc from XBMC and the programs in some parts are still very closely related, so close that you can even use a XBMC setup as a client for PMS just by adding a plugin.
The coreplayer actually used by PHT should be the one from Gotham (XBMC 13), officially released just 2 months ago. Helix (XBMC 14) is being tested at the moment and you can get it only as nightly build for the brave.
AFAIK PMS can already handle and direct play h265 content but not transcode. There are no official Plex-clients that can play this content natively yet.
Since the transcoder is based on ffmpeg we have to wait until this component will be updated. FFmpeg 2.2 is out already with H265 support.
Once this version will have been included into PMS we will also see h265 support in PMS and we will be able to play this content (transcoded) on all clients.
PHT has it's own build in coreplayer, the so called dvdplayer which comes from XBMC (don't know how much Plex is partecipating in the developing of the player itself). Plex is originally a forc from XBMC and the programs in some parts are still very closely related, so close that you can even use a XBMC setup as a client for PMS just by adding a plugin.
The coreplayer actually used by PHT should be the one from Gotham (XBMC 13), officially released just 2 months ago. Helix (XBMC 14) is being tested at the moment and you can get it only as nightly build for the brave.
I have not asked Tobias about what you are saying, so I can't say this with 100% certainty... but I am fairly sure that PHT has the Frodo dvdplayer. PHT does not utilize much (anything?) from Gotham dvdplayer yet (Gotham is only 6 weeks old). PHT has zero stuff from Helix yet as it has just entered alpha.
I have not asked Tobias about what you are saying, so I can't say this with 100% certainty... but I am fairly sure that PHT has the Frodo dvdplayer. PHT does not utilize much (anything?) from Gotham dvdplayer yet (Gotham is only 6 weeks old). PHT has zero stuff from Helix yet as it has just entered alpha.
You are probably right about Gotham. I thought to have seen already some additional features showing up in PHT but the codecs seem to be the ones used in Frodo. Regardless, this is rather offtopic
Plex is in Samsung smarthub natively and it is awesome. I have never seen anything like the upscaled 1080p .264 16GB extended Avatar on UHD. Truly amazing compared to 1080p clients and obsoleted the current spec Chromecast dongle onsite (which now looks blurry IMHO). I thought maybe I’d be able to direct play the h265, but no luck. Likely just mkv container…not sure. transcode errors server side which is a quad core Xeon with CPU hurt enabled. I don’t care if CPU melts a hole…I expect HVEC upscales more effectively by design than h264 sources.
HVEC allows plex enabled TVs to do UHD over wifi more easily due to lower bit rate streams. Everything the HU8550 upscaled looked twice as good. So now the TV is out in front of Plex. If the hardware does it…so should the software IMHO. My Note3 also has HVEC hardware support… same problem. No plex support.
I even built the libh265 libraries (used by gstreamer, available as .deb and deb-src) but Plex didn’t use them. Too bad.
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HVEC allows plex enabled TVs to do UHD over wifi more easily due to lower bit rate streams. Everything the HU8550 upscaled looked twice as good. So now the TV is out in front of Plex. If the hardware does it..so should the software IMHO. My Note3 also has HVEC hardware support.. same problem. No plex support.
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If you believe that UHD over wifi will ever be terribly stable for most users, I fear you are mistaken. There are far too many potential sources of interference and user misconfiguration for this to have a high success rate.
As for assuming that Plex should support H.265, I disagree. Plex gets a lot of core functionality from XBMC upstream. To abandon the gains from that just to chase down H.265 would be a poor gamble. H.265 only really shines on content greater than 1080p and that content just isn't there yet. There is no compelling source of this high resolution content to have any kind of urgency.
H.265 only really shines on content greater than 1080p and that content just isn't there yet. There is no compelling source of this high resolution content to have any kind of urgency.
Not that it would speed up the implementation of support, but it does shine on current HD content and yes, there is (the source) -- self-ripped/encoded BR discs. And then there's that thing called internet.
If you believe that UHD over wifi will ever be terribly stable for most users, I fear you are mistaken. There are far too many potential sources of interference and user misconfiguration for this to have a high success rate.
Uhh, you realize that NetFlix is streaming HEVC 4K content over the Internet, right? And they're doing it at 15.6Mbps; not much higher than a good AVC encode and lower than many. Even at much higher bitrates, 802.11ac should allow for this with no problems.
