I’m wondering if anyone has tried software transcoding (I’m not a Plex Pass subscriber) on the Western Digital PR4100.
I currently have the DL2100 and am wanting to upgrade for more drive bays, and if possible, to be able to transcode a single 1080p stream from an MKV ripped from Blu-ray if I enable a PGS subtitle. The goal is simply to be able to turn on the English PGS subtitles, which must be burned in.
Right now, the DL2100 cannot keep up at all, it’s something like 10 seconds of video, then a pause for 20 seconds of transcoding when trying to watch an MKV from a Blu-ray. Our clients are Apple TV 4k, so they don’t direct play like our Amazon Fire TV 2 boxes could do.
I just noticed in the NAS compatibility spreadsheet that on the PR4100 row in hardware transcoding fields, it has a tooltip “Has the capability, does not require Plex Pass”
I take it that this means I can enable hardware acceleration even though I am not a Plex Pass subscriber. Can anyone confirm?
Correct. Certain devices like the WD PR series and the NVidia Shield default to hardware transcoding. These devices will have issues with software transcoding. You do not need a Plex Pass to turn on this feature. For these devices, it’s the opposite and you will need a Plex Pass to turn off hardware transcoding and switch to software. Although, that is something you wouldn’t want to do.
I got my PR4100 installed and have been able to do some testing. I’m puzzled by what seems to be a discrepancy though.
On my iPad Pro 10.5 using the latest Plex client, I can watch a Blu-ray MKV rip at Maximum quality, with PGS subtitles selected, and the Plex server Activity page shows that the movie is Direct Streaming. The movie plays perfectly without interruption.
On my Apple TV 4K, when I try the same movie, same settings, the Plex Activity page shows that it is “Transcoding H264 (hw) to H264 (hw)”, and is unable to keep up at Maximum quality. It buffers every 75 seconds or so and tells me “This server is not powerful enough to convert video smoothly for playback…” It can only keep up when transcoding with PGS subtitles if I lower the Video Quality setting to “8 Mbps, 1080p HD”.
My question is why doesn’t the Plex app on the Apple TV 4K behave the same way as the one on the iPad Pro 10.5? The internals are almost identical, so the capabilities ought to be identical as well, unless Apple has somehow crippled tvOS as compared to iOS. Both my Apple TV and iPad are running the latest version of their respective OS, 11.4
Not crippled, but they are not identical. iOS can support PGS subtitles while tvOS cannot, so playing to the Apple TV requires PMS to transcode the subtitles.
