Has anyone tested if their system is even capable of realtime encoding H.265?
Every Intel 8th gen+ with iGPU are capable…
More precisely, 6th Gen supports encode in HEVC 8bit and 7th Gen+ supports encode in HEVC 10bit.
Being able to encode and doing it faster than real time are not the same thing.
Is encoding HEVC at 4k60 or 1080p120 very slow?
My slowass j4105 can do that
In answer to your question, my Core i7-7700 with Intel Graphics 630 iGPU can re-encode a 6.5 Mbps 10Bit x265 movie that is 1 hour 53 minutes in length, quicker than real time…
Re-encode to 4 Mbps 720p 10Bit x265 using QSV in 25 minutes
Re-encode to 4 Mbps 1080p 10Bit x265 using QSV in 44 minutes.
I haven’t tried multiple conversions at once, however this is a 7th gen i7 and it can do it, and so the answer is a resounding YES 
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Anyone with an NVidia GeForce 20 series (or later) card can perform real-time HEVC encoding using NVENC:
Any Maxwell (2nd Gen) or Pascal GPU can encode HEVC easily. Turing added B-frame support for better quality but it’s not mandatory for video encoding.
I am soon moving away from my place with fiber & symmetric uploads and to someplace with typical HFC upload speeds (all internet packages from budget to gig+ having either 25 or 35Mbit upload). Having the ability to encode to and prefer HEVC when the client supports it would go very far towards preventing a single WAN stream of a higher bitrate h264 media from crippling my internet. Sure bandwidth limits are an option, but the lowest 1080p limit option is 8Mbit, meanwhile plenty of my 1080 HEVC content comes in at around or under 2Mbit and looks amazing. This would be a huge QOL improvement, as I would prefer not to have to kneecap my friends’ stream qualities.
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And this is main downside of Plex nowadays - You no longer want’s to make watching better - You want make good business decisions.
Many small features, small changes that can be simply implemented as option to turn On/Off from settings are pushed back “because business decision guy” - it makes using Plex more and more irritating for advanced users.
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Blimey!.. Somehow I missed that post in this thread!
I completely agree @jerry1333 … If everything comes down to a business decision then one could say that the passion is lost.
However I would also suggest that now in 2023 when so much more hardware is capable of handling x265, surely this has to be worth a look at some point?
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Agreed.
Someone mentioned business decisions.
Well, Plex holds market share because of its points of differentiation. Wide client support for the most part.
JF and Emby are catching up quickly. In the iOS environment, Infuse is ahead. Emby is better for Live TV/DVR and channels/plugins better. JF, being open source, is attracting the core base that Plex had, despite not being as polished as Plex for now.
Innovate or die.
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So far I’ve been resistant to try Emby or Jellyfin, primarily because of how much work and grief it’s likely to be to start learning a new platform and then trying to replicate the way I use Plex… Maybe someday that will change and something will push me over the edge… But just not yet!
Yeah, for me the main edge (and it is a big one) that Plex still has over Jellyfin is the easy of remote access. At this point, I am just not interested in investing the time and energy to learn how to do things like “reverse proxies” or whatever to get it going. I do have a “mirrored” Jellyfin server running on the same hardware as my PMS that is already set up just in case Plex dies or takes some wrong turn in the future, though.
I saw today that Intel’s AV1 encoder now supports HDR → HDR encoding. That is my ideal endgame for transcode capability.
agree
If licensing fees prevent plex from implementing HEVC, how about VP9 as an alternative? That should be similarly widespread.
So what’s the plan from Plex? Just stick with exclusive x264 transcoding forever?
It’s pretty ridiculous that it’s either full bitrate 4K (which could be up to 80mbps) or fallback to half the resolution.
How many people need to request this feature for them to consider working on it?
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They simply don’t give a sh*t. I mean come on, can you try even harder to ignore your userbase? 
My future prediction: it’s 2027… no hevc because of some business guy and still ignoring this thread… 
We are a “media” server with clients but… what is hdr, 4k, hevc, … Nahh don’t seem worthwhile.
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