Has anyone put together a list of what formats most of the main devices on the marked (Amazon Fire TV, Roku, PS3/4, Xbox, etc) will play natively without having to be transcoded?
I have several friends that connect to my plex and transcoding is killing my little server. Most everything I have is mismatched formats in .mkv containers and was thinking about re-encoding them all into something a little less stressful on my CPU.
Thanks
Ray
The one format that can Direct Play (not transcode) the best across most every client Plex has is MP4 H264 with AAC stereo audio. You can sometimes sneak in AC3 or DTS 5.1 and depending on the client app, they might also Direct Play.
Assuming that the bitrates aren’t higher than the client supports (generally about 20Mbps) you should be able tot Direct Play this on almost anything. Also, if you are going to do a remux/recode, pay attention to the MP4 levels. Make sure it’s not higher than 4.0 or 4.1. Some client apps can use higher, but not all.
HTH!
Can you integrate Subtitles in a MP4 container like you can in a mkv or am I going to have to either hard code them or use external subtitles with MP4’s?
There are several factors besides file format that determine transcoding. Bitrate vs. network connection speed is another big one, and you cannot always control this. Plex is designed around transcoding to deliver its feature-set… avoiding transcoding is like buying a car and trying to figure out how to use it always in 5th gear.
@SirRey No, subtitles are going to be sidecar files, either srt’s or some other format. Since srt is the one format that can usually be Direct Played anyway, this isn’t a bad thing at all, IMO. I have all of my movies in a separate folder for each movie, so think of the folder as your MKV container if you like. Everything for that movie goes into the folder, so if I need to move the movie, I move the folder. Easy.
Yes, Plex was designed around Transcoding. But I think the whole mind set has changed somewhat. When I’m using less than 3% total CPU on a 4 core processor (so 400% total.) for one Direct Play stream, I can have way more Direct Play sessions going than I could ever hope to have bandwidth to support.
The days of honking big CPU’s to transcode a few streams at a time are about over, if you take the steps to maximize your media’s Direct Play potential. A small NAS can run Plex perfectly fine, if the media is in the right file container, using the right video and audio codecs. I know… I did this for over a year with a CPU that only had 300 passmarks… I set the media up for Direct Play and that’s exactly what it did. Transcoding still sucked… Of course it would, but DP always worked to any client I set up to it.
YMMV, but I think we are seeing a turning point with the OM feature, and (when we get it) User Bitrate limits. Plex now is less about transcoding than it was, leaving that for the one-offs and rely more and more on Direct Playing the media if it’s set up to support it.
Here are a couple of jpgs that prove the point. My CPU is an i3-4330 with less than 5100 passmarks.
The first shows the CPU transcoding then throttling down. The second shows a DP stream on the same CPU, same resolution video that the transcode was converted to. Night and day difference in CPU usage. Look hard at the scale on the left of both graphics…
I’ll let you make up your mind which is better for the CPU.
You can embed a mov_text subtitles into an mp4, but I don’t know if any Plex client supports these for direct play. Depending on the client, PMS can transcode the subtitle to srt and direct play that.
Check out this post, which has the link to a spreadsheet with great info on most media players:
forums.plex.tv/discussion/215429/direct-play-native-file-formats
@astrofisher said:
I use Rasplex on Pi2, so there might be some differences, but I had to create some odd variations to find media that it couldn’t direct play. My media is mostly mp4, h264, high, level 4.0, with acc audio, so all my clients can direct play.
