Am I missing something? How is this person getting transcoding to hevc?
I wish I wasn’t 
EDIT: Whatever is going on it doesn’t work so I’d rather it not happen.
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This is me adding my +1 h265 encode. I pay for plex pass and I am still about to migrate my whole stack to a competing platform (and go through the pain of retraining my users) because they at least are trying to implement the codec.
Look I get it, there is some weird quirks with playing the content on different devices. I get that tone mapping is hit or miss with h265. I get that some platforms just straight up do not have the decoder/encoder or support b-frames. FFMPEG support is inconsistent. It’s a mess.
HOWEVER it’s a mess that I am willing to deal with, and make decisions based on the shortcomings. I have set up a full serving stack for many self hosted projects. I am the key demo to troubleshoot these things FOR YOU. Just release a experimental branch and let your more advanced users test the use cases. I am begging you.
Even a option for background h265 encode for versioning would satiate me.
Sincerely,
A customer sick of checking this thread for a year hoping something will change.
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+1, we just simply need that.
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If you re-read the very first words of the very first response to the post you will remember,
LOL
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Throwing my use case in: I don’t necessarily need H.265 transcoding on the fly, but I’d really like to be able to use the Optimise feature to re-encode older, high bitrate H.264 content that I rarely watch but want to keep forever. I am willing to pay the price of a slight degradation in quality caused by the reencode/recompress in exchange for substantially smaller file sizes.
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Hey folks, just wanted to jump in here to let you know that we’re aware of this thread and others asking for H.265 encode support, and we hear you, but unfortunately there are no plans to add support for encoding to H.265 or other newer high-complexity codecs at this time. As always, we’re keeping an eye on the available technology as it develops (as well as real-world benefits and any development and distribution challenges) to ensure we can keep delivering the best possible experience for everyone.
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it could safe us some bandwidth… the highest i can get here is 1000/40 mbit. of course i could switch to an enterprise connection which is only 2.800€ a month.
the fact that you don‘t have any plans is disappointing.
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In 2008, Plex adopted H.264 which was “too complex” for the time. Plex is an innovator. Twelve years later, AVC is passe. It’s 2021 and all modern silicon has dedicated instructions. QuickSync, NVENC, or VCE; pick one. You’ll find embedded systems will follow your lead. When Plex says there are no HEVC encoder plans, what I hear is “Plex is a 1080p” company. Don’t get left behind. H.264 just isn’t cutting it.
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If you’re just interested in saving bandwidth why not re-encode your media yourself? Plex supports decoding HEVC/x265 just fine, just not encoding. Many have done this with handbrake etc for efficiency.
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I can’t answer for who you’re asking, but I only want 1:1 rips for myself to watch. I don’t want “good” reencodes. Nor do I want to have two copies of everything. I would like my friends to have the best quality transcode (due to my limited upload bandwidth). H264 only allows 720p for my situation if I want to be able to stream 2 or 3 at a time. H265 would allow 1080p. Plus for my devices that can’t play the 1:1 rips, it would allow the highest quality for the available LAN wireless bandwidth.
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loss of quality, time to create the files (>100tb), storage.
i will wait for my provider to give me higher speeds or plex to allows for transcoding to x265. both will happen some day. lets see who is quicker
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That is simply not possible with on-the-fly transcoding. In order for the transcoder to not take too much time, certain compromises have to be made. This applies to hardware transcoders as well.
A good software-only transcode, made at the “slowest” speed setting is still the best quality transcode you can get. But using that for “on-the-fly” transcoding is just not practicable (unless we get suddenly better CPU’s with speed improvements in the category of several dozen times over current top models).
So a newer nvidia gpu is not able to reencode a couple 1080p h264 video to 1080p h265 in real time? It is only powerful enough to encode it to a lower bitrate version of 1080p h264 or 720p h264? That seems to go against what I have seen elsewhere. I would just be looking for 1080p h264 high bitrate to 1080p h265 at 4-6mbps instead of the lowly 720p h264 at 4mbps.
https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding
The only other options are
- Paying a lot more for higher bandwidth.
- Having multiple copies of everything. (Paying for more storage)
- Sacrificing on the quality of local files.
It is. I was particularly highlighting that it won’t be able to do this in the highest possible quality.
Oh for sure. I just meant that if I can share 4mbps per user for 2 or 3 streams, what they would get for “quality” would be maximized (or just better) with h265 than h264. No?
No doubt.
Thanks for answering this. That said, I think it’s a ridiculous stance for Plex Inc. to take.
Of course, we all know they’re going after the money in services, don’t really bother that much with serving our own files.
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Can you give us some insight as to why you don’t even have it on the roadmap for the future?
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I think @OttoKerner said this:
HEVC not that good option for on-the-fly transcoding.
That said, I can see the “Optimize media to HEVC” path as temporary solution for wishes in this direction. @OttoKerner While it’s not strictly on-topic, can you please elaborate if Plex thinks about offering things like this?
