Does Plex Media Server support hardware accelerated transcoding on the Pi 4 and/or is it beneficial over CPU transcoding.
I’m talking about transcoding from H265 to 264, or from H264 1080p to H264 720p.
I have not yet bought Plex Pass, so I can’t test it for myself. I’m planning to buy Plex pass if the hardware acceleration feature makes a tangible difference on a Pi
I don’t know that pi 4 supports hardware 265; I know it supports 264. That being said, to the best of my knowledge, plex does not support hardware transcoding on the pi, unless it has been added in the past month or two.
Until they add hardware transcoding to the pi (if ever), you’re really limited to direct play, or transcoding from 480p to something lower.
From the Raspberry Pi website, they say the Pi 4 supports “H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode)”.
My understanding of transcoding is very limited, but that documentation leads me to believe that the Plex hardware should be capable of doing what I hoped (H265 1080p -> H264 1080p, and H264 1080p -> H264 720p ). If I can assume that support of 1080p H264 encoding means that it can to 720p encoding too.
So I suppose the question is whether PMS will then automatically be able to take advantage of the hardware support built into the pi, or if it needs to be programmed into the PMS software itself. If it needs to be programmed in, has that been done?
I didn’t realize rpi 4 has 265 decode, so in theory I think what you said could work; decode 265 - > 1080p (or lower) 264.
Last I cheched (a few months ago) PMS did not support hardware anything on the Pi platform, but from this thread it seems like hardware acceleration is enable for the pi 4. If that includes 265 decode I’m not sure…
I also read through that thread.
It seemed like there was mixed opinions though. Some people seemed to believe that it was supported, while it seemed that some others said it wasn’t supported.
I was hoping that someone could come and give me a conclusive answer
Sorry I wasn’t much help. I gave up on PMS on the pi and bought a used Optiplex 7010 with an i5 for $100. Been working great, supports a few 1080p transcodes.
No problem. I appreciate your effort.
I never actually considered using an Optiplex as a server. Its not exactly ideal right now due to space and power constraints, but I’ll definitely keep that option in mind for the future
My pi4 should be here tomorrow. I’ll see what I can make it do.
Awesome. I look forward to hearing your feedback
Unfortunately, Plex does not support any hardware transcoding on any Raspberry Pi.
not even if we gave it a biscuit?
Damn, thats a pity. Glad to hear it straight from the horses mouth though. Thanks for the feedback
Hi. Considering the latest announcement about GPU transcoding for Plex, could this be included as a side effect of sorts? I don’t know if the GPU on the Pi is capable at all.
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