Supported codecs and containers for the Web-based player

[goatboy]

Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488
Player Version#: 3.77.4

Hi! I’ve recently set up LiveTV via the plexHeadend TVHeadend proxy app, and everything is working well enough in my Roku app that it’s no longer a big concern. TV is played without transcoding just like I wanted, b/c the box running Plex is a QNAP NAS and I didn’t want to waste horsepower encoding.

However, when I try to watch LiveTV on the browser on my computer (be it on Linux or Windows), it seems that the signal is being transcoded even though the quality is the same (1080p60). The stream is an MPEG2/MP2 within an MPEGTS container.

So I have a couple of questions:

1. where can I look to see why Plex decided that it had to transcode the signal? (i.e. unsupported codec, unsupported transport, etc.)

2. which codecs/transports are supported by the Web client (version listed above) so that I can tweak the TV configurations in hopes of using supported formats?

Transcoding to H.264/H.265 is a no-go because, as I mentioned, I don’t want to invest the horsepower.

On a sidenote, where can I find specifications on how the LiveTV component interacts with TV devices? I know the HDHomerun devices support URLs like ${ip}/lineup.json and lineup_status.json … but I don’t know what information could be provided as part of that to help the LiveTV component pro-actively identify the type of stream in play (i.e. to avoid having to autodetect it from actual content). Google wasn’t my friend here, sadly

As an example, the JSON perhaps could contain tags which indicate the type of codecs in use? Would this help the LiveTV component?

Thanks!

[pl_5309]

1.) Live TV OTA(over the air) is MPEG2 and Plex will stream and record using this format/codec.
2.) Browsers are h.264 forcing a transcode.
3.) Roku’s have MPEG2 codec, the Plex client will use it if set to auto.
4.) On Windows you can install the MPEG2 from the windows store and download Plex Media Player to direct play.
5.) Linux I haven’t tried the Plex Media Player.
6.) Some QNAP’s support HW GPU transcoding, check your model against the NAS compatibility list.

[mervincm]

plex add on call tautulli will tell you item by item how it is treated.