Quick Sync vs Passmark

[pl_5309]

Personal opinion is that home streaming 4K is not ready for the average Joe, but if you are willing to invest the time and money venture forth.

Quick Sync is the only officially supported Hardware Transcoding (Decode and Encode) method under Linux at this current time. With the proper Passmark score CPU’s are more than capable for H.264. H.265 (4K) uses exponentially more computational power and custom ASIC’s (GPU’s) are the way forward for this along with greater network and disk demands.

[INFO] Plex, 4k, transcoding, and you - aka the rules of 4k

NOTE: for 2022 – Plex has come a long way since this FAQ was originally written, HW transcoding has become more available and more stable, and tone mapping was recently added to address the hdr/sdr color conversion issues. The first 4 ‘rules’ generally are no longer as important as they once were, but may still be a good thing to bear in mind. Dolby Vision, is an entirely other mess. THIS thread/FAQ is NOT about DV. DV work is still in progress, and there are no perfect TV’s or external devic…

Why isnt plex team dropping everything making hw transcoding 4K work for everyone?

If I may add to Achilles’ post and to address concerns here: Plex does not publish roadmaps and will rarely publish a “To be available” date. Engineering is working on upgrading the transcoder. I see references to people purchasing hardware. Purchases without fully understanding the capabilities of the hardware or based on an expectation is always ill advised. To restate Plex’s transcoding abilities: Intel Quick Sync Video (Intel CPU internal ASIC) provides decode and encode capabilitie…