@Stevenson-Price said:
… it’ll happily Direct Stream all of your H.264 videos, but may transcode other video types (which can struggle on underpowered NAS devices).
Shouldn’t it be powerful enough to handle transcoding by itself?
Whoops, was already answered on page two…
Does your app handle MKV with subtitles on device, or will Plex try to transcode on NAS? That is the only drawback I have in my current setup: DS213j, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple TV 3. I airplay from my phone to the Apple TV, but when I turn on subs, the NAS grinds to a halt as it tries to transcode on the server. Infuse (iOS app I used before switching to Plex) does handle this all on device (but lacks external access and the better media management)
@samplex said:
I hope the Apple tv now transcodes the movies and not on the NAS.
If not Apple TV 4 with simplex is a waste of money for me personal.
That’s not how the Plex ecosystem and model works. All the content is served up (and transcoded) from the Plex Media Server; this allows for simple non-powerful clients (phones, TVs, tablets, etc) to exist on all sorts of devices. That’s not going to change, and nor should it. If you’re buying into the Plex model, you should get yourself a NAS powerful enough to do the transcoding.
I disagree. If the client can handle stuff on its own, it should be able too. There is no reason for the NAS to transcode anything on my iOS device just to get subs in…
Don’t get me wrong, I like plex, and the idea was great a few years ago. One powerful family computer that stores and handles all the media. But this model will break down once we hit all 4K media and when concurrently transcoding 2, 3 or 4 4K files will be common in a household.
Hardware transcoding will be in more devices every year and that makes the role of plex the brains and the file server in my opinion.
My only reason for using Plex is that the new Apple TV does not provide the new Siri search features for Home Sharing content streamed locally from iTunes. My hope is that this will be enabled via Plex. Otherwise I have no use for it.
@Lezz said:
I disagree. If the client can handle stuff on its own, it should be able too. There is no reason for the NAS to transcode anything on my iOS device just to get subs in…
Don’t get me wrong, I like plex, and the idea was great a few years ago. One powerful family computer that stores and handles all the media. But this model will break down once we hit all 4K media and when concurrently transcoding 2, 3 or 4 4K files will be common in a household.
Hardware transcoding will be in more devices every year and that makes the role of plex the brains and the file server in my opinion.
Realistically, that level of 4k adoption is at least 5 years out. Also, you seem to want plex to be kodi and should probably just use kodi. That said, i think it’s idiotic that plex doesn’t have hardware transcoding yet.
I see what you mean, and, 4K adoption is indeed years away, but I used it to illustrate my point that I think devices will get better at hardware transcoding so that the ‘brains’ of the operation usually only has to serve files.
I used Kodi before and also Infuse on iOS. All three have their strengths and drawbacks. Hardware transcoding for plex would also be nice on the server side, as you said…
What about text based subtitles (external or internal .srt in mkv for example)? The server will need to transcode in this case to embed them or do you have a way to still direct stream like the Samsung TV Plex app is doing?
@ilfrance said:
i’m too interested in knowing how this will handle srt subtitles
Currently subtitles are handled by the Media Server transcoding them into the video.
I’m looking into native parsing and display of text based subtitles, as I know this is an important feature for some people. This won’t be ready for launch though.
Please keep us posted when your app gets approved.
