I guess this is a somewhat generic question so please bear with me. I have a PC running Windows 10 Home. It has an Intel Core i7-6770HQ quad core, hyper threaded processor running at 2.60GHz burstable to 3.25GHz. It has intagrated Iris Pro Graphics 580 graphics. I am running 8GB RAM and a 1TB SSD.
I have been using Plex for a few years and have had no real issues with it but now that I have upgraded to a 4K TV in the living room I have been buying 4K media and ripping them with MakeMKV. I have been doing this with 1080p media for years. I still have 1080p TVs in my office and the bedrooms. These TVs including the 4K are all connected to Roku devices of one flavor or another. When viewing the 4k content on the 1080p TVs transcoding 4k to 1080p washes out the color. I noticed for transcoding with tone mapping to be supported requires Plex Pass and also that some of the transcoding settings are not in the transcoding part of server settings (Advanced). Do any of you know if with my Windows based server buying Plex Pass will resolve my issues? Thanks.
Your CPU will probably not be powerful enough to transcode 4K material + apply HDR-to-SDR tone mapping. Transcoding for 4K media will require a Passmark score of approx. 12000-17000 for SDR or HDR content respectively (that is excluding the tone mapping). Your CPU’s Passmark score appears to be at approx. 8200 points.
There’s the option to use the GPU for hw-accelerated transcoding.
Your CPU/iGPU is probably a fringe case for that – IIRC, Intel iGPUs only fully support 4K HEVC HDR transcodes starting with the Kaby Lake generation (1 generation after yours). Even with a more capable GPU, there seem to be limitations to GPU supported HDR-to-SDR tone mapping on Windows
Do you mind if I ask another question? Quite often on Blu-rays, 1080p or 4K, if the audio track is set to 5.1 AC3 the movie will start and then immediately fail to play. To fix this I have to disable direct play. When I then play again and look at the stream info it shows a container called hlc rather than mkv and shows the video and audio “copied” not converted. This only happens when playing through a Roku device and not on all movies with AC3 5.1 audio selected but most that I have ripped. This behavior is not happening when I play the same movies via my LG C1 tv’s built in apps. Is this just an issue with Roku devices and what would be the ramifications of just disabling direct play on Roku Plex app for everything? Thanks
Sorry, I’m not familiar with Roku devices – though I don’t seem to remember any significant issues in that area about those clients reported in the forum
