Plex as a transcoding media server?

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I am new to Plex and all its features and capabilities, and am thinking about the possibility of using it as an extension to my good old WDTV Live Streaming since this decoder doesn’t support x265.

So my question is would it be possible to do x265-to-x264 transcoding on-the-fly with Plex so I can play these files on my WDTV Live Streaming?

Thanks!

2

Not sure about the WDTV – but Plex will attempt to transcode files that cannot be played as-is on your (Plex) client to a compatible format on-the-fly. That’ll certainly depend on how powerful your server is.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201774043-what-kind-of-cpu-do-i-need-for-my-server/

With a Plex Pass you can also configure your server to use a GPU/iGPU for hw-accelerated transcoding.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

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3

The WDTVlive is a generic DLNA compatible player. Plex doesn’t do transcoding for these, unless it has detailed informations about the player.
There have been attempts before to write exhaustive device profiles for the WDTV, but none of them produced an all-encompassing solution. How do I make subtitles optional streaming to an WDTV Live box? - #3 by OttoKerner

I recommend you to use “real” Plex clients. Category : Player Apps and Platforms | Plex Support

Or use a different DLNA server.

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4

Thank you for the reply!

I’ve been using Samba to share media files on my home network and it’s been working fine with the WDTV Live Streaming.

The only thing I am looking for is a way to make the WDTV Live Streaming “play” x265 files, which means it needs transcoding on-the-fly. Do you think I have any chances of achieving this? Whether it be via Plex or something else? Or at least make WDTV Live Streaming load .srt files via DLNA with Plex?

5

Not with Plex, unfortunately.

6

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