Hello all! Does anyone happen to know - If you are watching live TV through Plex on your home network on multiple devices concurrently… If the devices are watching the same channel, would Plex use a single transcoding session across those devices, or would it still have to transcode for each device? I guess simpler way of asking the question is - Does Plex transcode live TV per channel or per device?
I’m not 100% sure, but I’d imagine it would most likely be per device, as the requirements of each device could be different.
Watching and recording uses the same stream. I would anticipate the same stream would be used so one tuner for the same channel but I will test
@“Mike’s Plex Media Server” Just tested. Recording a show, watching on Nvidia Shield and watching on Ipad all using a single tuner and I am showing 3 independent Plex transcoder session in task manager. the only one using any significant CPU 10-30% was the ipad as it had to be transcoded.
Thanks for the info, @BRBMan !
@BRBMan - Of course, this now leads to a follow-up question: Do you know why it would need to transcode for the iPad but not the Nvidia Shield?
@“Mike’s Plex Media Server” Absolutely - Codec Support The Shield can play the stream natively, ios or the ipad does not have near the Video and Audio Codec support so it cant natively play near as many formats as the Shield Can, So it has to be transcoded into s format that the ipad can play. All Clients are not equal, of course the nice thing about plex is the server can transcode to fit your device. On the other end if your server is low power then chose your client wisely. If you need to transcode to alot of mobile devices, chose your server wisely
@BRBMan - Very helpful! Thank you!
