I’m working on some customisations with the Plex transcoder, which require some features that are only in ffmpeg 5.X at the moment (libplacebo, libvulkan, etc). One example would be applying custom shaders to the stream while transcoding, for sharper CNN-based upscaling.
While I did successfully upgrade it myself by downloading the Plex transcoder source, rebasing it against ffmpeg master and painfully porting all of Plex’s modifications, it was a lot of effort to get it building (especially around glibc / musl bindings…) and it’s not really sustainable to maintain as Plex transcoder gets updates.
So, to any Plex employees - any chance that the transcoder will be updated anytime soon?
Updating to a newer ffmpeg base would be nice but I have doubts that we will see it soon.
However, seeing that someone was able to get it working is a great starting point. Would it be possible to start a community-driven update for the Plex Transcoder (if this does not violate any plex terms of use)?
Don’t ask me for any real details, but my understanding is that the plex transcode system is a fork (of sorts) from ffmpeg and is now a whole separate thing.
Don’t get me wrong, would love to see Plex get the latest and greatest. Especially if they every allow transcoding to be encoded in h265, since most of my clients now have compatible hardware
But it’s a pain to maintain and keep up to date with every Plex release since I don’t have their build system and had to recreate it myself, so I abandoned the project and just moved it to be based on Jellyfin instead, where they are using standard ffmpeg and so I can inject my shaders normally. I would love to support this in Plex, but it requires a transcoder update first to do so.
Especially if they every allow transcoding to be encoded in h265
Their fork already has h265 support. As far as I can tell, supporting h265 in Plex doesn’t have anything to do with the transcoder, and is only to do with the product side of things.
I meant this to mean “if a transcode is needed, allow it to be trans/encoded into h265 for remote clients”. Currently if re-encoding is needed its only to h264
You’re obviously more in-tune with what Plex have been doing with the transcoder. I really don’t know why they chose this direction; to me, it doesn’t seem like a good idea for the long-term. They must have had a reason/need to do it?
