Assigning the right player & codec based on file formats
:D I'm ready to pay money for this product when its complete and able to deliver on all its promises, finally an amazingly easy to use product with an excellent interface, some more tweaks and it will be fantastic.
I have all sort of file formats to play from mpeg, Vobs, Avi's... Xvid, Divx but mostly MKV is where you see the difference, Now, I have a device called Dvico that plays through Mkv smoothly as knife through butter, yet when I play some of my MKV files I can see fractures and flies in a lot of scenes, so I played MKV on MPlayer or Divx Player and it plays much better, so being able to select different players to play some difficult formats in the background will be a plus since I love to enjoy a good clean picture and I guess selecting the right player or at least the player codecs to play certain formats will bring better A/V experience through one player which is PLEX.
um, plex can play all of those formats perfectly. using external player/codecs would only DECREASE its compatibility. plex’s video player is based on ffmpeg, which is BY FAR the the most compatible video decoding library with the best format support. the other video frameworks out there (quicktime, windows media player, etc) are all closed source and with very small format support and crippled in speed and features. Plex (and other ffmpeg based players like mplayer, vlc, or xbmc) already IS the right player for every format.
PLEX, I truely believe it is the best home media center Ive seen so far, I believe in it so much I bought 4 Terabytes HD's, Drobo 2 and a totally new Mac Mini just this month for this purpose only... but I might not have delivered my request or what I was aiming at by my question....
to say it straight to the point MKV playback can be better the rest is fine, by MKV shows alot of flies and fractures in the backgrounds, specially solid colors or sky colors... MKV usually gives me the best picture every time, specially the ones ripped from my HD-DVD collection.
First I want to say I am not forum staff, nor am I a developer. I just want to help as my way of giving back to Plex.
I don't understand your request honestly. If I had to guess I think you are basically asking "I want better x264 (which is what most mkvs are) support."
On that issue I must say that most of the community agrees with you- the developers of Plex put a lot of time into making sure Plex can playback HD files without issue. I myself have a near army of ripped Blu Rays and mkvs gotten from the net and Plex plays them all perfectly.
If you are having trouble then you need to mess with your settings. In Plex's Video settings it has the option to use "Software Upscaling" for all content which helps a lot even with HD stuff. Also Plex has the option for a "H.264 Speed Boost" This option exists to allow slower machines to play x264 content, but when its on Medium or High it greatly decreases the quality of playback so turn that option off. I think this is what is causing your issue.
One last thing to consider is that Plex uses CPU power for all its video playback. If you machine doesn't have enough CPU power you will experience skipping or audio getting out of sync. My personal solution to this was to build a machine for Plex with far more CPU power than even the highest end Mini, but I have heard from others that the newest Mac Mini is more than capable of playing everything.
Which brings me to my final point- I think as part of your request you are asking for Plex to be able to use a device you have which is able to use hardware to decode x264. I will say right now that even though its not my decision to make I can tell you from experience around here that the developers are not keen on using playback engines that are not FFmepg (the one it currently uses) in Plex. They do everything they can to make sure Plex's main engine is the best it can be. If you want hardware accelerated playback then Plex is not a good option for you. Instead you should put Linux on your new Mac Mini and use XBMC which (only in Linux) utilizes the Nvidia cards in the new Mac Minis for x264 playback.
Thank you that’s exactly my question and I would like to thank you very much for the answer and the insight, I will try to tweak the video settings and see.
is this a statement or are you looking for help? if it’s the latter… let’s provide some more details. the Plex server log files provide detailed information if Plex does not direct play a video – that’s mostly the case if the (Plex) client tells the server it is not aware of a particular combination of container, codec, bitrate…
