I am looking to use a Raspberry Pi as my player for our main TV. My question is it able to play all files as direct play without needing any transcoding from the server or player side?
I know when I use my MacBook at home as the player with the home theater app everything plays great. No buffering or transcoding needed. I am looking for the same experience from RasPlex but not sure that I completely understand the capabilities.
Please let me know and if I am missing something.
If you buy the CODEC licenses available at the RPi site and add the license codes to your RasPlex config.txt you should be able to view most standard videos without transcoding, but not all formats.
The CODEC support of the RPi is quite limited and for some videos in my library I am forced to use transcoding in order to play them through RasPlex.
Another option would of course be to convert such videos to a format that doesn't need transcoding, but I'm not willing to accept the quality loss which is inevitable in all such conversions.
(Some loss may occur in transcoding as well, but that loss doesn't affect the library files. It's just a temporary display issue.)
As for buffering/stuttering, some problems must be expected for the very highest bitrates, but most of those problems can be fixed by raising the speed of the RPi which can be done in two major ways. One is to let the boot shift over from using the normal SDcard to using a good USB3 stick, which is much faster. The other method is to add some overclocking specs to the config.txt file. Note that overclocking should never be done with a slow SDcard, as they tend to be corrupted by it.
Best regards: dlanor
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