Support Direct play HEVC Movie and Transcoding to HEVC

[JeremyPeng]

Now supports 4K’s smart TV and TV box, including iOS11. They have been fully support HEVC, including even HEVC 10bit hardware decoding.

So，about Plex Client and Server, can you support Direct play HEVC Movie and Transcoding to HEVC?

[Vitorero]

It would be a very, very good feature!!!

[Ascentw]

So, I want to direct play h265 files into my tv without transcoding (it’s possible since I can watch hevc files using the sharing options of windows without any transcoding) but it seems to be not possible to do it when using plex. I tried a few things but nothing really worked or was directed to allowing direct play for hevc.

I’m not 100% sure about this, but the way it is PLEX just forces h265 encodes to transcodes which:
-make the cpu usage higher for with not so much purpose
-could (i’m guessing) make the quality of the video worse since it’s converting the file to h264. I know it probably exists by default because some smartvs wont accept hevc and so it avoids the majority problems of “my tv wont play ‘x’ file”, but at least allowing by some option in configuration to direct play hevc (h265) files to the TV would be amazing and a lot better, since it’s possible to.

[tom80H]

Playback of HEVC/h.265 encoded videos is possible and will work on many platforms – however those can be picky when it comes to the combination of other technical aspects of your video file. Some will e.g. play h.265 videos – but only in mp4/m4v containers. Some might play h.265 videos – but not in combination with certain subtitles/audio formats. Sadly, some vendors offer wider support to stream various combinations in their own apps than through their APIs.

There’s an extensive thread about the dos and don’ts of 4K streaming that you might find helpful.

[INFO] Plex, 4k, transcoding, and you - aka the rules of 4k

I do not know how your computer is doing it. But I know, it would take artificial intelligence to do it properly. Unfortunately TeknoJunky confuses a few things and the wikipedia articles cited are also not the best. There are a few fundamental things to keep in mind: Digital video is not encoded in RGB but in a different colour space in which a much more efficient data reduction is possible. In that color space the brightness information and the colour information are largely decouple…

Beyond that I’ll be closing this thread:

1. the playback part is covered/available
2. the transcoding part is already covered in a significantly more popular feature suggestion

Transcode to HEVC/x265

Is the ability to transcode to HEVC/x265 something that’s on the roadmap? Most, possibly all, of the people I share my library with use playback devices which support HEVC playback. I’ve got a very beefy Xeon processor with more cores than I have fingers in my server that is perfectly capable of transcoding a couple streams to HEVC. It would be nice if there was an advanced option, or maybe a feature for PlexPass subscribers, to enable transcoding to HEVC for devices that support it to increase…