My HTPC can't handle transcoding a 1080p HEVC video. Can Plex Home Theater play this natively?

Dev Community Apps & Creations
1

I have Plex Media Server and Plex Home Theater running on the same computer. It’s a small HTPC with 4GB of RAM and an i3 CPU. I’m running Lubuntu 15.04.

I was trying to play a 1080p video, with the HEVC codec. I guess it has a pretty high bitrate (7 772 Kbps). It’s only a 30 min video, and it’s 1.65 GiB.

So when I play the video in Plex Home Theater, I see a whole bunch of transcoding processes. Unfortunately, the CPU can’t keep up, and the video keeps stalling.

I tried installing libde265, but that didn’t fix it. Is there anyway I can get Plex Home Theater to play HEVC without transcoding? I think it should be fast enough to play without transcoding.

For now I’m just converting the video to h264 using ffmpeg. But I might need to play more HEVC videos in the future, so it would be good to figure this out.

2

The new Plex Media Player does (replaced PHT). No signs of transcode activity on my server, very little CPU usage on my old Intel Core 2 Duo macbook (client), and Plex Web registers the stream as direct play.

3

Seems very client version specific

For example PMP on pi will not but openPHT can play hevc up to 720 (hardware limit) that is set in in openPHT to match

PMP has no such settings on the pi

PMP on Mac seems to handle most things direct while forcing the pi to transcode more than it does while running openPHT