I am trying to playback some pretty hefty 4K 10bit prores quicktimes on my smart phone and was hoping to get a transcoded version that plays back on my device (iphone).
I have just followed the advice on this thread:
but instead of downloading the link there, I went via the main download page on plex and selected the armv8 for synology as the supplied link in the forum did not work. the file I manually installed on the server is PlexMediaServer-1.15.4.919-8e2884e4b-aarch64.spk.
I am not on my LAN at the moment but I can see via my plex account that hardware transcode option is not available. When I try and play these on my iphone, it takes about 1 minute for the video to play the first frame and then it stops and buffers again.
Thanks, yes I purchased a plex pass but do not see the hardware acceleration option under the transcode settings. The thread I linked to in my OP seems to suggest the ARMv8 flex media server version would support hardware accelerated transcoding for the DS418+ did I get this wrong?
PS I already transcode my files using ffmpeg but don’t want the headache of managing proxies myself. Ideally the media server would manage that, even if there was an option to offline transcode to a variety of formats would be ok, although it wouldn’t be very efficient in terms of disk space.
right, I guess I am using plex more like a media browser as the file structure I am using is not specifically targeted at flex, it’s just my file structure and I have plex read that as a library, so yeah I could create a mirrored structure and have plex point at that which would contain my transcoded versions but that’s not really what I had in mind.
In an ideal world, I would have a NAS able to online transcode the originals, but as you suggest it sounds like I need a better NAS to handle this.
I don’t think there is much wrong with the way my files are named…
2019_04_21_18_14_54/P1011784_prores.mov
it doesn’t get much more complicated than this, I am not using plex as a film/tv library, purely as a library to browse my own files. Perhaps I should be using something else though, I would use DS photo which supports most of the image formats I use but it doesn’t support prores, that is why I was looking at plex but then got caught up figuring out the transcoding parts…
Thanks for the reply. Yes aware of handbrake but I prefer command line as then I can automate the workflow which is why ffmpeg is better for me.
Yeah I could offline transcode the videos, maybe that’s the best solution as it seems I’m after something that just doesn’t exist. Ideally my library and my final edited sequences would be interchangeable. In other words I could view each clip as it was shot in high quality, with a rec709 lut and not a log based recording but also have flexibility to invert that lut back to log and colour grade and edit those clips and generate sequences. I’ve pretty much solved the colour side of it but I think I’m list too niche for consumer NAS and media servers. Basically my video clips and my edited sequences are both valid media but right now one is prores log and the other is another format and stored with a display lut baked in.
I think the simplest thing as you suggest is an offline transcode to a format that my NAS can handle and I just pay the extra storage price, I can have my laptop transcode in the night when I don’t care etc.
In a way it’s a bit like the derivatives issue with stills from camera raw, embedded 12bit raw data and conversion down to an 8bit jpg - ideally there would be a (at least) 10bit stills format that’s web friendly but it just doesn’t exist so the output format becomes something that isn’t desirable to edit with (so you have to always store the original).
