Sync support for HEVC/x265, converting to x264 to then download (resolved with downloads feature)

I also use custome xml profiles and it worked great for some time, but suddenly it stopped working. Maybe this post can help you, since I got it working after long debugging sessions.

So the scenarion is, that i use an newer iPad capable of HEVC playback. I use the iOS.xml profile that is beeing refered everywhere and it used to work until recently.
I have video transcoding disabled, so I would get the error message saying it cannot write the transcodeded file to the servers disk.

In the debug console I found out, that the profile for my device was wrongly matched:
Debug — Sync: sync list : user 1 (@.), device iPad, profile Plex Desktop …
so that got me thinking, why it wasn’t using the iOS profile.

What fixed it, after long trial and error, was, deleting the Login of that device in https://my.plexapp.com/devices and after logging in back in from the device, it was finally using the correct profile iOS and from there the syncing worked again.
Hope that helps, cheers

needless to say this would be great/sensible.

R

Hey question. i’ve been direct playing 265 format video using chrome for months and i recall it pushed out an update that I allowed and now it transcodes all my 265 to h264 and my audio will only play AAC format so some format are also getting transcoded too.

I tested this in Internet explorer which uses the same web.xml file to determine transcoding and it direct the same file chrome will not. I much prefer chrome over IE. Do you guy know why this might be happening with just this browser? I’ll start digging through security setting maybe loose those up some to see if its cause by some security update they did.

Yea Ok that’s stupid weird. Now that i played the video on IE once and direct played everything in chrome that wasn’t direct playing before is back to direct play. I’m guessing something was bugged. Either thanks if you read this far i seem to have inadvertently resolved it for now :smiley:

Any chance of anyone looking into this? X265 content is becoming more and more common, transcoding back to X264 when trying to sync just doesn’t make sense.

It is now at the point where I have to manually copy files onto my iPad for longer trips.

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A lot of the issues have to do with device and licensing. Lookup x265 licensing, sounds like it was at quite a cost and so many of the large company have started making their own codec “AV1” rather than adopt it as a standard… lame but we’ll see what happens with AV1 they’ll probably ruin it with some type of DMCA integration. which would only further the reason for the adoption of x265

Would be nice if someone from Plex could chime in at some point. If there is a valid reason then surely they can just put it up

AV1 doesn’t have licensing restrictions - they have anti-restrictions. Their licensing is basically “It’s free but: if you sue me over this, then you lose the rights to all the patents me and all my friends have, and if you keep using them, all of us and all their friends^2 all sue you for all that stuff you got for free before”.
Plex could perhaps use it but I think there’s also some minor exposure risk if they don’t do it carefully, as well as a potential benefit of access to the AV1 legal fund.

technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity (i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigation).[24] As a defensive condition, anyone engaging in patent litigation loses the right to the patents of all patent holders.

There is also Sisvel, who is being a jerk and trying to get people to pay for this royalty-free codec anyway. Sisvel | Sisvel's AV1 Licensing: Next-Gen Video Coding
Analysis
https://www.cnet.com/news/patent-group-wants-a-new-toll-on-the-streaming-video-road/#:~:text=Sisvel%20begins%20selling%20licenses%20for,that’s%20supposed%20to%20be%20free.&text=AV1%20is%20a%20video%20compression,to%20store%20and%20stream%20video.
If Plex joins the AOMedia consortium, they should be fine.

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You might want to check out the new download feature (currently available for Android, coming soon to iOS). This should cover this suggestion.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-overview/

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Just a brief follow-up.
The “download” feature mentioned above has been in preview for Android and iOS for several months and has recently taken a step to the public stage.
If your device supports direct playback of your media as-is, you can now download the items in original quality (no transcoding).

Note that the download feature has a few limitations and isn’t a full implementation at this point. Two examples are no more selective download of episodes (you can only download specific shows, seasons or playlists) and also picture in picture playback doesn’t work with downloaded content.

Just to catch up on your response (w/ a one-month delay – sorry).
It’s true there’s some differences as Downloads aren’t a 1:1 re-implementation of Mobile Sync. Though it does address the scope of this feature suggestion.

As for your remark about selective downloads of episodes. That’s working quite well for me. I can…

  • download individual episodes or seasons/shows
  • if I select seasons/shows, I can pick newest X episodes and next X unplayed episodes – or all of them

Thanks for the reply @tom80H, I think I need to play around with the selective download options a bit more.

Also with the latest Testflight version, Picture-in-Picture is now working on iOS with downloaded content.

2022 clean-up: implemented (downloads)