x265 gives dogshit quality when transcoding fast. You need to transcode to slower or placebo to retain quality. x264 doesn’t have this problem. You can transcode to fast or very fast and still retain quality. The transcoding speed only affects the compression efficiency. I don’t think x265 is a good solution for transcoding in real time with plex. You can read x265 documentation here : Preset Options — x265 documentation and x264 documentation here : Encode/H.264 – FFmpeg
As much as i would love to have the option, I understand the HW limitations.
I’m guessing that Plex (the organization) has plenty of stats on the install base of CPU/GPU serving up PMS, and how many of those are doing how much transcoding. And until those stats show some magic number of installations that have native h.265 encoding in hardware, either on-die or with gpu assistance, it’s a non starter.
So the simplest answer I would toss out there, (without having any authority to do so,) is the control of the when HEVC transcoding will be available is in the hands of we the user base. The more PMS installations that have hw support, the sooner it will be here.
Hmmm, I hear the Apple M1 had it on-die.
Only problem is, as soon as Plex delivers the first beta, I will likely want be in the process of requesting support for x.266.
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you def don’t need plex x265 encoding support for this.
running ffmpeg in a loop to encode your entire library would be pretty straight forward.
pretty much every free or sub $1000 encoder is using ffmpeg under the hood
Obviously. I mean, you don’t need Plex for all sorts of things. I don’t use Plex because it’s the only option, I use it because it’s easier. Thus, I’d like this feature to make my life easier, not because I don’t have any other way to do it.
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Just dropping in to keep the thread alive.
I still want this, even my little 9th Gen Intel iGPU can hammer out 12 or more 720p HEVC encodes at the same time in 1mb encodes and they look every bit as good as the 3mb 720p H264 encodes from Plex, this is all I want, just better compression, I don’t care if its slightly better or not on the visuals, I’d just like the option to save bandwidth, I think 3mb for 720p streams is overboard, It should be streaming 1080p at that bit rate.
Even a GTX750ti can do some sort of H265 encoding, I have tested my 1080ti, Titan XP, 2060 Super and 2080, they all can totally encode 1080p 3mb at hundreds of frames per second and the quality is awesome, yes its better on RTX, but you really have to be picky to spot the difference, heck even Intel has had this in this in there CPU’s since 2015, thats 6 years on one of the most implemented CPU/iGPU’s around, Skylake and upwards if I remember correctly.
Yes one can use something like Tdarr to re-encode there entire library, but Plex will just want to transcode your 1mb H265 720p files to 3mb 720p H264 when streaming.
Honestly we need a little more control over the decode and encode features in Plex, maybe make it part of the advanced features, so normal users don’t see them, as I can only assume Plex Inc are taking an Apple stance on things and assuming that all users are mindless idiotic meat robots and everything comes down to us just having access to one big button, I’m sure these companies see humans evolving into a big fat blob with one arm and one finger, because after all, that’s all you need to press one button 
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I still want this as well. I don’t understand why it can’t be an option at the very least. Give us a checkbox to allow H265 encoding to destination devices.
To those that say h265 gives dogshit results at high speeds is ridiculous. Modern NVENC encoding can give you real world results for how this would look and it looks good. No one should be transcoding to h265 with their CPU. This isn’t new tech and this isn’t expensive to add.
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All hardware from 2015-2016+ support HEVC, most HW is deprecated in 6 years so in theory everyone should have HEVC supported devices in this day and age 
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True where I work, untrue at home.
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With hevc being so common today I don’t understand why Plex always transcodes down to h264. I have friends that stream off my server and I could get more bang for my buck on the upload speeds of my ISP if I could transcode and stream to them using hevc. My content is 4K HDR and they transcode down to 1080p. I don’t want to maintain different versions in storage using media optimization.
Please add an option to tell the transcoder to use hevc if the GPU supports it.
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I also suggest +1 for a HEVC transcode option in plex.
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the dog in the pan gets crazy if he hears this!! we need it!!! it is so much easier for us to buy better hardware than to get better upload speeds! don‘t lose focus plex!!
It is not free for a commercial product to (legally) encode to HVEC/x265. I suspect Plex would have to pay a license fee, possibly per user which would likely make it nonviable for them.
As far as I’m aware, licensing for H.265 is even less onerous than H.264. I suppose it could be licensing but it seems like they just don’t really care about features like this anymore because it doesn’t bring in any additional revenue like these content deals they’ve been making the last couple years.
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Using VP9 would be even better than h265 as there is no license fee. Quicksync has supported HW encoding for some time.
For optimized versions, we should slowly start looking at AV1.
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yep, provide the option to use HW 265 encoding for transcoding for those that can use it. keep 264 the default, but at least provide the option for those with HW offload.
i’m stuck limiting my users to 4mpbs due to poor upload speed and using HEVC would give me better quality per mbps
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+1 for me.
I’d love for plex to modernize here.
Almost all hardware (certainly supported hardware by manufactures) supports hardware decoding of H.265 or VP9. Either would be a great choice to use as a transcoding format. We could get much better quality with less CPU time and bitrate. It’s a huge win.
VP9/Opus is good enough for Youtube, it should be good enough for plex.
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Another +1. At least give us the option, with as many caveats and warnings as you like: if it’s crap then we can switch it off!
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+1 this feature will be a must have…and perhaps plex include this 265 encode/decode in the plex pass
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Can I vote for this with all 5 of my votes? Joking aside. I think even at the hardware level this is fairly common now. I just looked up the CPU in my NAS and even it seems to support hardware encoding for H.265. I don’t have some exotic high end NAS either. It’s a fairly mainstream box. The Nvidia Shield has H.265 encoding capability. If hardware like that can do it why aren’t we able to toggle on 265 transcodes?
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