Whilst I support the original post, especially in reference to reducing bandwidth needs, the topic has only had 447 votes amongst millions of users. Sure, only a small subset of Plex users are active on the forum.
Real time transcoding to HEVC/265 remotely is possible but only marginally possible for most platforms and impossible on many.
Personally, it is a minor need with my users and my media (I did use one of my votes however).
I can see why others would value it more.
Didn’t they already tell us that, hardware support aside, x265 support was not practical due to licensing fees? Maybe I am misremembering.
The same way x263 and x264 have been abandoned? hogwash. (neither has been abanded)
The problem with AV1 is that is that Roku and most other streaming devices do not support AV1 and unless everyone upgrades to devices (that don’t exist under $100) EVERY SINGLE video encoded in VC1 will require transcoding even 480p DVDs will need to transcde.
Maybe in 6 years, but certainly not in the next couple years.
If Plex were to add a Transcode to either or both x265 or VC1 determined by the Plex Player’s capabilities that would be fine too.
I think it was 4-5 years ago I bought everyone in my family a Roku Ultra as a “stocking stuffer” because it had hardwired LAN and x265 decode.
I couldn’t keep growing my collection beyond h264 720p because that would have required nearly everything to be transcoded.
I’m still going through my collection and re-ripping Blurays and replacing lower-quality versions.
I have an Intel A380 on Windows and it’s a charm. All the current gen Intel and Ryzen CPUs have x265 and AV1 decode (and encode) and that’s the way the industry is going.
My theory for Plex not implementing x265? (besides them being resistant to improve their software in general) Royalties.
Based on just the hardware alone (streaming sticks/players) which can decode x265 and CAN’T decode AV1 that is simply not the case.
We only have history to show the way…
To think that AV1/2 etc will be so good that 100s of millions of consumers will want to replace their devices that work perfectly well is just ignorant - plus it would be environmental suicide.
AV1 isn’t THAT much better than x265 anyway.
Both can and will co-exist for long after AV3 has been released. That said, I do think AV1/2 will be the next defacto standard and x266/VVC (Versatile Video Coding) will have a difficult time gaining any traction against a free well-supported competitor.
We can check back with each other in 10 years and see what actually transpired. Otherwise, our gabbing about future standards is academic.
You have a lot of enthusiasm for this subject matter!
It sounds like we’re on the same page in terms of current and long-term adoption factors? Your situation seems pretty different than the person I was replying to, who already stores original format and expressed some concerns about making the right single-effort compression choice.
The good news is we have a few options according to our priorities / needs, and no shortage of information to shape our decisions!
We’re nearing the end of the year, so again I need to bump this to try and get attention on this issue. It’s only getting worse as quality expectations (as well as HDR) increase with time.
If this is a royalty/cost issue, is Plex investigating transcoding into AV1? So the client receives AV1.
Intel cpus with integrated graphics have supported HEVC 10bit HEVC encoding in hardware for 3-4 years now, since kaby lake and maybe even Skylake (partially I think). This needs to happen
I might be bringing up a point already addressed but how sure are you of that? In 2019 I thought no Intel IGPU’s supported HEVC encoding, instead they only supported HEVC decoding.
If this is a royalty/cost issue, is Plex investigating transcoding into AV1? So the client receives AV1
AV1 isn’t well supported by most manufacturers and will more than likely have a successor before the likes of phone and TV manufacturers consider it, H.266 is very likely to be standardised before the industry bothers with AV1 and H.266 is going to make AV1 completely redundant. That’s still not a good reason to not support AV1 but it is probably going to be one of the many reasons why they won’t fully support AV1.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed the industry surprises us.
Man, you quoted my post from 2019 about Kaby Lake CPUs lmao, I’m not sure of anything anymore.
Google, or even Bing for that matter, could have told you the answer:
Any news about this ?
I have a 4K x265 encoded video, when streaming it to to full hd TV it uses x264 which is less efficient.
Will Plex be implementing support for transcoding using hevc?
Ive heard a few theories why it wont be implemented right now. Some say Plex may have to pay some hefty licence fees to use HEVC/x265 in the server to transcode in real time. Some say that the amount of power needed to transcode to HEVC/x265 in real time at reasonable quality, Compared to x264 just doesn’t make sense right now.
I really dont see this being added TBH… I think we’ll see AV1 being added before HEVC/x265, Once hardware has caught up & can perform as good as it does with x264 right now. Who knows…
Unfortunately this will not happen. I think AV1 transcoding has hope though. I started a request thread for it here.
Honestly, it’s unlikely to happen. AV1 transcoding is noticeably more efficient than HEVC and has already been implemented by many video delivery sites (YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitch etc).
On the other hand, HEVC NVEnc very performant and could be a feasible choice for low-quality transcoding (but the quality loss will be significant). Then again, AV1 NVEnc would be an even better choice.
More options are always welcome, so I’m not against it, but I would rather see AV1 implemented over HEVC.
Seems like this will be a thing soon…
We just posted a preview build with this feature in case anyone is interested 
Awesome!.. Thanks @chris_decker08… Will wait for the public release but absolutely stoked this is on its way 
Never thought it would happen at this point. Figured they would skip it and go right to AV1 or something. Better late than never, though. Will be nice.
Oddly with no bitrate reductions, though. The primary reason people were asking for it.
If you needed to transcode due to a bitrate limitation you’re already compromising quality compared to Direct Play. Logically if you could do x Mbps before, you can still do x Mbps now, you just get better quality for that transcoded bitrate. If you want to reduce bitrate then you can still change your setting at the client side. You can also set the per-stream bitrate at the server side, but you’re assuming remote devices will always be on the same speed connection (mobile phones and smart TVs would get the same stream), and you’re assuming everyone can use the HEVC playback. So folks on H264-only devices will just get more reduced quality.
What you’re asking for would require Plex to make a judgement call of what quality HEVC is comparable to H264. You don’t want that. Whenever a company creates a codec they always overstate how good it is compared to whatever is the current dominant codec. Remember when MP3 came out? The makers claimed 128 kbps was “CD Quality”… yeah… 128 kbps MP3 = 1411 kbps PCM. 
