Also a vote from me.
I’m sure the year is 2021 and intel has been able to quick sync encode and decode HEVC for the last 6 years. Plex server users are mostly tech savvy people so make it an option or get left behind.
I’m not a programmer but changing the encoder/codec shouldn’t be too hard a job with all the people with Plex passes having already chucked money at the company in good faith to help it keep up with Jellyfin and the like.
Personally I’d rather the time be spent on this than designing a nice new gui for the Roku and apple users as this seems more of a glaring ommision.
What really irritates me about Plex not doing anything with this is that most my library is already in HEVC, so if I want to take one of my 20Mbps 4k files and serve it to a user at 10 or less, I’m actually getting like a quarter of the quality if I understand the efficiency of 265 correctly. My understanding of all this is a 20Mbps 265 file is most similar to a 40Mbps 264 file. Also, someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t 264 limited to 8 bits? Meaning that if we could get 265 encoding we could serve transcoded HDR files instead of losing HDR during the current transcoding process.
Ditto. My upload speed is limited to 40Mbps and I have no other options for Internet service providers.
Having Plex support higher compression formats that have wide Player support (Roku, AppleTV, etc) would be a blessing.
My simultaneous streams aren’t limited by my hardware, it’s limited by my Comcast internet connection.
Bummer, Plex. Please continue to investigate adding h265 encode/transcode support.
You’re using this to make Plex transcode to h.265 on the fly? I only looked at it briefly, but it gave me the impression it is used to simply transcode and create new files that are h.265 which would be a different issue. The goal here is to have Plex do this automatically on the fly when it would be helpful.
Yeah well I understand the need to transcode live but with a good enough profile (this is still a re-encoded file) you could re-encode all your file and be done with it as I did years ago
The script can even validate the results before deleting the original
Again not optional and I believe Plex should enable custom setting to the transcoder which is based on ffmpeg I believe.
This could be stored in profile etc
It defeats the purpose, though. For home use many of us want the best quality possible. For some remote uses a bitrate of 2-4mbps is all that is available. That would mean either having multiple copies or having the only copy being a low bitrate h.265 file that would look crummy on a 77 inch tv.
I and I think everyone else in here want this for x265 to x265 transcoding on the fly. Encoding my already existing x265/HEVC library to smaller files doesn’t interest me as I don’t want to incur any more loss in quality or take up more space. I want on the fly x265 transcoding so my 10-40Mbps files can be served up to my users without annihilating my upload speeds. I think a lot of modern Plex libraries are already heavily encoded in x265/HEVC. Mine is probably 90-95% HEVC including even most of my lower res stuff at 480p.
Ditto. I personally have combed through their FFmpeg code and while their fork is dated (2018), it surprisingly has the prerequisite H.265/HEVC encoding baked into it. They simply refuse to utilize their code to its fullest potential for undocumented reasons. For perspective on just how old H.264 is, I could play H.264 on a PSP in hardware way back in 2005, over 15 years ago! Only having H.264 hardware encoding is pure laziness at this point when FFmpeg has all the necessary bits in place.
The future is not to be discovered in the dusty past of that old and outdated relic of a codec. Where the future lies is in H.265/HEVC which is far more performant and efficient of a codec. If Plex wants Plex Pass’s hardware encoding to remain a positive point on their marketing sheet, they need to get their heads out of the past and add support for h.265. Otherwise, in 3-5 years, maybe us Plex Passers will move to Jellyfin once it is up to feature parity with Plex in the most important aspects (Plex Arcade not being one of those feature ) since it already has H.265/HEVC hardware encoding support.
i have quite a large Library of Media i own on disk that i simply refuse to store in h264 and have transcoded from the disk straight to h265, understanding there is still a Loss in quality but one id have to really go looking for sitting right in front on my tv.
i did this for both Storage and Streaming reasons.
So getting the point, its rather frustrating that plex forces me to transcode that down to h254 using way more bandwidth for remote instances
to put it bluntly, We do need Built in options for H265
Agree, this is especially crucial for streaming on mobile or on lower quality connections when away from home. If it’s a licensing issue, then what do I pay for Plex Pass for…? Put the cost up by a few cents to cover it and I think you’d even gain subscribers who are after this but Plex Pass hasn’t been a big enough value to date.
I started using x265 encoding after adopting plex. I use an external encoder MCEBuddy which drives the ffmpeg command line and has great results. It does require Windows unfortunately but I just switched to a new Synology NAS and I’m experimenting with scripted ffmpeg options to externally encode the files before handing them over to Plex. I’m pretty confident this can be streamlined as-is but I agree it is long past time Plex should support the new standard for 4k inside the product.
Also it would be useful to have options to select 2160p on the player side. That way 4k 60-80 Mb/s content can be direct played locally and transcoded to 4k hevc at lower bitrate for remote play.
+1 this feature. This is honestly essential at this point. HEVC/x265 has been out for so long, and limiting transcode quality to x264 hampers Plex’s utility greatly.
If this doesn’t get support sometime this year, I’ll have to switch over to Jellyfin/Emby which seem to be better keeping with the times.
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