No entirely true. Devices do have resolution limitations as well. Some devices will downscale locally from 4K to 1080p, but some will not and so they will not direct play 4K content, regardless of the codec. This is device dependent.
This is a personal preference kind of thing. Looking ahead 4k is on the horizon. I believe within the next 2 years it’ll be pretty main stream. But today its really not. I made the decision to transcode any h264 files over 10 gb to hevc with handbrake to save drive space. My system is set up to transcode HEVC 4k or not. There was a lot of trial and error putting this together but realistically I will probably have all 4k screens within a year or so, then transcoding becomes a moot point. I am not your average computer user. There are a lot of you out there just like me. But the bulk of the users are just pretty clueless, and they are running low to mid grade gaming machines
With this in mind Tek is pretty spot on with his 4k rules. His rules are realistic. Is he 100% accurate with everything he posted… No… No he’s not. You can transcode 4k with Plex but for the life of me I don’t understand why you would want to. In my opinion using a GPU to transcode is just low quality.
4k video is massive. If you cant direct play it why burn the drive space?
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Thanks for the kind words and feedback!
I fully admin I don’t know everything, and opinions will of course vary on the usefulness or importance of transcoding 4k/hdr/x265 content.
But if anyone sees something that is not 100% accurate, if they could please kindly explain or point to something more accurate, I would be happy to make modifications as necessary.
I put the original post together, because these where the things I had to go through or search for and learn about in my own 4k journey, and it wasn’t easy to find all this info spread out across this forum and/or the internet.
Tek they are more like rules of thumb. Good advice
Encoding video is CPU intensive. For many years Intel held the reins on the CPU market and they wanted their due. GPU Encoding popped up over a decade ago, it took the load off the CPU. You could do more with less processing power by handing it off to the video card. For all you old timers out there think 387 chip.
Intel countered with quick sync, and in my opinion effectively killed GPU encoding. They are in the CPU business not the GPU business.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing Intel here. They make the cream of the crop as far as I am concerned… I just wish I could afford it.
The release of AMD’s Zen architecture has been a game changer for anyone wanting to encode h264 video. A multi-core, multi-threaded CPU until recently cost upwards of $800.00 can be hand for under 200 bucks. That’s right boys and girls 1700x’s are selling under 200.00. That 8 cores 16 threads that rips through H.264 like a fox through a hen house. But wait… We want to transcode HEVC (H.265) to H.264.
HEVC is just amazing. A 30 minute TV show that the DVR puts on the drive in mp2 is upwards of 6GBs, transcode that to H.264 and it’s about 1.5 GBs. HEVC on the other hand is less then 500 MBs
The Problem with HEVC is it is ridiculously CPU intensive, it really doesn’t matter if it’s 2160, 1080 or 720 HEVC is HEVC
It’s like a Pickup Truck trying to pull a freight train as far as your CPU is concerned and Yes the newer Intel CPU’s with quick sync do it faster then anyone else. But as far as Plex is concerned we don’t need to encode HEVC we need to Decode HEVC. which by the way can be done on the cheap with any HEVC compatible video card.
I had a R9 280x video card in this system and pulled it if favor of a GT 1030. People look at me like "you fool”
Here’s the deal they both decode HEVC. The 1030 uses 30 watts of power not 250 watts doing it.
So in closing. I use a video card to decode HEVC and the Ryzen 1700x to encode H264.
For me this was the least expensive solution I could find, bottom line is simple. If you don’t have the hardware to handle HEVC heed what Tek is saying… Just stay away. Momma’s old laptop I don’t think is gonna handle it
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Hi, you do understand that quicksync uses the intel integrated GPU (not the intel cpu), right ?
For example, if you have an intel CPU that does not have a IGPU, then there is no quicksync.
So quicksync IS gpu encoding & decoding. It is simply intel’s ‘brand’ of gpu encoding/decoding.
Nvidia calls their version of quicksync NVDEC and NVENC.
In the first post there are links to quicksync and nvidia charts.
Also, the ‘387’ chip was the ‘co processor’ to the 386, the 387 provided hardware floating point calculations (much faster than than running on the 386).
So similar, but totally different. 
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Perhaps I should have used the words “Integrated and discreet GPU encoding”
I mean Intel came up with a single chip solution… Point being it effectively killed the need for a different video card. And logically it would be safe to say development research is based on sales… At least in my little world it is ;). It was what, 10 years ago or so ? At the time I was in deep on the discreet video cards that could do it. When quick sync hit the market all the rest never really matured it just pretty much fell to the wayside. For me it was a big waste of money. Chaulk 1 up for Intel and that big hammer they swing
From an end user stand point, if you ever ran a 386 with out a 387 and needed it you’d see the correlation or put another way the 387 did to the 386 what GPU encoding did to the CPU imo , but I think you got my point
Oh yeah I totally get your points.
Still, quicksync is gpu decoding/encoding video.
Quicksync is NOT what does 2d/3d graphics.
Intel Quick Sync Video
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Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel’s brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011, and has been found on the die of Intel products ever since.
The name “Quick Sync” refers to the use case of quickly transcoding (“converting”) a video from, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone.
Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This allows for a much more power efficient video processing.[1][2]
Intel’s single chip cpu/gpu solution, while totally useful, and does avoid the need for a dedicated graphics card, is still does not provide necessarily anywhere near the same level of graphical performance (ie games or gpu assisted software) as available with external gpu solutions.
In other words, an integrated cpu can be great for laptops and non-gaming needs.
But if you need high performance gaming or 3d designing (autocad or adobe or apple final cut, or any huge number of applications that can make use of powerful gpu’s), then an intel integrated gpu likely won’t cut tt.
It’s all relative. Todays intel integrated gpu, is better than amd/nvidia gpus from a few years ago.
But todays nvidia 10 and 20 series, or current AMD cards, waaaaaay better than todays iGPU.
Anyway, despite intel’s single chip solution, discreet GPU’s are still alive and well. And plex supports both so it’s all good. 
this sounds way awesome
Version 7 (Ice Lake)
The Ice Lake (microarchitecture) adds VP9 8/10-bit[13], HDR10 Tone Mapping[14] and Open Source Media Shaders[15]
Yes I know
Let me try again and us a qoute from your article ” Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware [core] on the processor [die]"
It’s been over ten years that the 4870s and the GeForce 9800 GT came out. Do you feel as thought the discreet GPU encoding market kept pace with Intel’s quick sync ?
Sales for those cards was for gaming, not video encoding, they could encode video but God it was awful on a large flat screen. It never really matured. ATI had their thing, Nvidia had something else but it was Intel that captured the market, it was on the CPU. How can you compete with that? It was their hardware that was supported first and foremost. It effectively stop anyone from buying the competitors CPU slotting in a big video card with the hope of transcoding high quality video. Excellent marketing decision on there part. Good for the average at home computer user? not so much.
The “Wintel” monopoly has controlled this industry for upwards of 30 years now. If you want to play you have to pay their price.
And so far I have been resourceful enough to not half to. Why do you think people are gobbling up old Xeon workstations to run Plex? It’s affordable.
Dayum… You got me on a rant here 
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Would you be able to shed some more light on your setup.
Asking this because I have an nVidia GTX1080 with a Ryzen 6 core CPU.
And even with HW acceleration enabled, my transcodes continue to buffer. All this while PlexTranscoder hardly uses 4-5% GPU. I would have expected it to utilize more GPU percentage if the stream was buffering.
I’ve been trying to decide if I want to splurge and get a video card for transcoding. I’ve got a i7-8700K processor, but it hits near 100% CPU when transcoding a single 4K stream, so I’ve started having a 1080p rip alongside my 4K rips. I recently turned on hardware transcoding, but I’m concerned that I won’t get as good of quality, because that’s the warning I see all over. All of my rips, though, are straight from MakeMKV without passing them through Handbreak or anything else, just straight off the disc.
What’s a good, but cheap, nVidia card that would handle two or three simultaneous 4K transcodes? And do I really risk seeing worse quality during the transcoding?
your 8700k should work with hardware transcoding easily without a separate video card.
for one, if you are transcoding on the fly from 4k to 1080/720, its for temporary use anyway, and you are not getting any better quality than an original 1080 bluray, so it generally does not really matter what quality… the transcode doesn’t stick around or replace the original 4k anyway.
second, you should judge the quality by your own eyes and not what you read on the internet.
third, until (or even if) plex can do HDR > SDR conversion, hdr content will be washed out colors when transcoded and watched on most clients (some clients can do hdr color mapping on their own).
so, you don’t even need to worry about an nvidia card with your current cpu.
When it’s trying to transcode with GPU, what’s the CPU usage at? Also, try changing to a different audio format and see if it still buffers.
CPU also idles at around 10%. It is natural that it will buffer when it is hardly using any CPU/GPU to transcode. Interestingly, I also tried Emby and that also acts in similar fashion. However, if I turn on DLNA in Emby, and then use a different player on client side, like VLC to play the file off Emby DLNA, the GPU usages suddenly spikes to around 30% and video plays smoothly. So at this point, I am pretty certain that my hardware is pretty capable. It is just that Plex or Emby apps are not utilizing the hardware and complaining that server is too slow to transcode.
this isn’t really a troubleshooting thread, you might have better luck either searching for other threads with similar issues and specs, or starting a new thread and detailing your exact system specs, OS and software and driver versions, so that you can get the help you need.
My Plex server is a Synology DS918+
I upgraded the ram to 16GB
I have 2 NVME SSD for read and write cache. Samsung 500GB 970 Evo’s.
I have 4 4TB WD RED PRO in SHR (raid 5).
I am able to direct play 4K HDR content just fine on my Samsung QLED Q6FN. HDMI ARC works great for direct playing. I usually choose AC3 5.1 or DTS-MA HD.
Out of all the clients I have tried, hands down the Nvidia shield is the best. It’s a badass.
The average file size for a lossless 4k bluray RIP into an MKV container is between 50 and 80GB. So make sure you have lots of space. I have to also RIP the 1080p copy along side because of the color mapping issue as mentioned in the original post.
My NAS has Intel quick sync. I can transcode more then 5 1080p streams at the same time (I ran out of devices to test this with).
My NAS is in another room than my 4K TV. I have an Asus Rt-ac87u that is in media bridge mode connected to an Asus RT-AC88U which is connected to my NAS with 2 Gigabit LAN ports setup with link aggregation. The speed between the 2 wifi routers averages between 1.2 and 1.5Gbps on the 5G.
I really hope Plex can figure out how to fix the color map issue. I would really love to be able to not have 2 copays of every movie. My NAS is capable of transcoding 2 or 3 4k streams at once. I have tested it and it transcodes fine but, the color is literally grey. I really hope they figure that out. Other than that I absolutely love plex and synology.
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I am really hoping that there will be a way to do fix tonemapping while using existing CPUs and quicksync. Given that intel is adding tonemapping to soon to be released hardware, I am doubtful it is possible.
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I just upgraded to a 4k projector and a new avr. I have a netgear NAS running plex and a 4k roku premiere+. If I try to play a 4k+TRUEHD 7.1 mkv I get both audio and video stuttering due to transcoding. If I switch to direct play and passthrough both audio and video stop transcoding and are perfect, but they are very much out of sync. Like 3-5 seconds. Is there any way to fix this?
steve
You mean you select a different audio track in order to get Direct Play? The Roku’s do not support decoding or passthrough of compressed lossless HD audio codecs like TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio.
Good point, this is weirder than I thought though. Plex Now Playing shows TrueHD 7.1 being sent direct play, but my AVR shows 5.1 audio is input. A quick google seems to indicate 5.1 can be extracted from the truehd 7.1 stream by roku. Now, the good news which I can’t really explain. I had 10.2mbps cables and they were forcing my roku to 4k HDR 30Hz. After I replaced the cable tonight and had 4k HDR 60Hz enabled, the audio sync problem is gone. The only thing I can think of is that aligning with the 30Hz was tying up resources in the roku or something. I guess I’m all set. thx
