Playing 4K on Sony AF9 - Direct Play or Transcoding?

General Discussions
1

Hello!

We want to buy a new TV in the next weeks and it will be (90% sure about that lol) a Sony 65AF9, now I have a few questions about using Plex on the TV as I don’t want an external box or anything similar and I’m pretty new to all this Plex stuff.

Plex Server will be a Synology DS918+ and the Player will be the Android TV app. Video source will most likely be mkv, hevc, h265, x265 and idk what else. The TV has a long list of supported codecs but I think this is for the internal player, will Plex support them as well?

  1. If the TV supports the media I don’t need to transcode it, right?
  2. If I don’t need to transcode it, I can just use Direct Play, is this correct?
  3. What about HDR and DV?

Codecs of the AF9 for USB Playback

MPEG1: MPEG1/MPEG2PS:MPEG2/MPEG2TS (HDV, AVCHD): MPEG2
AVC/MP4 (XAVC S): AVC, MPEG4, HEVC/AVI: Xvid
MotionJpeg/ASF (WMV): VC1/MOV: AVC
MPEG4
MotionJpeg/MKV: Xvid
AVC
MPEG4
VP8
HEVC/WEBM: VP8/3GPP: MPEG4
AVC/MP3/ASF (WMA)/WAV/MP4AAC/FLAC/JPEG
WEBM: VP9/AC4/ogg/AAC/ARW (Screen nail only)

Thank you very much!

2

The TV itself supports all those codecs and formats natively so there won’t be any transcoding.

4k will play natively, but note there is an issue at the moment on Bravia TVs with Plex and Kodi 4k playback having a grey letterbox (instead of black) for movies that are not fullscreen. Netflix app is not affected. Lex are working on it, not sure about Kodi. It’s a minor issue but worth knowing about.

Generally speaking I prefer to use the Kodi app with Plex add on as its way more stable. The android tv app is slowly getting better but needs more work. You might want to have a quick Google for kodi support for your particular Sony TV as i seem to remember that Sony deliberately blocks Kodi on some of their premium Android TVs. Weird but true.

3

Awesome! Thank you very much :slight_smile:

I will look up the Plex for Kodi Plugin, I read a lot about Plex and Kodi and came to the conclusion that the Plex UI is just better to use and even my wife would use it but I’ll check it out