I’m not sure this is directly related, but direct playing some HEVC movies in 720p using Plex Media Player 3.77.2 (Source is Plex server 1.14.1.5488) is using a lot of CPU power on my MacBook Pro mid-2012 under MacOS 10.14.2.
“a lot” meaning between 75% and 80% for the Plex Media Player process and 35% to 40% for the QTWebEngine Process.
Playing the exact same movie file in QuickTime uses around 9% for QuickTime and up to 15% for VTDecoderXPCService; VLC and IINA both use around 25% to 30%.
The movie’s bitrate is pretty low with 689 kbps, but I noticed that it has a 60 fps framerate, so I guess Plex Media Player doesn’t like that.
Is this when Plex Media Player is in TV mode or web client mode?
Put PMP into its TV mode
Then click on the user avatar
Settings - Video
Enable ‘Hardware Decoding’
1 Like
This was in what is now apparently known as “web client mode”.
Are we supposed to go into TV mode for playing movies on computers now?
the web client will transcode web-incompatible formats making the computer work harder (assuming PMS and playback are happening on the same Mac)
1 Like
No, just for changing the preference.
You can afterwards go back into Desktop mode if you prefer it.
@darcilicious No transcoding, I convert every movie manually to 720p h264/5; if there was transcoding happening, it would bog down PMS on the Synology box. This CPU-guzzling is purely PMP.
@OttoKerner Ah, thanks, that’s a relief! TV mode is rubbish IMHO, at least on any platform that’s got a mouse or a touchpad. Why anyone would want to navigate Plex using arrow keys is beyond me.
The fact that one even has to go into silly TV mode to switch prefs does hint to a TV-mode-only PMP future, I fear.
Back on-topic: switching Hardware decoding ON, both with ‘modern hardware’ and ‘older hardware’ (how am I supposed to know which is which, BTW?), shows some change.
[Edit: no change → some change. ~120%CPU to ~65% CPU is better than nothing, even if it’s still more than double what QuickTime uses]
Playing in TV mode is slightly better:
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
