With the Space benefits of h265, it gest more popular to have non-4k stuff encoded in h265.
What would look like the transcoding requirements of a 1080p-hevc to 1080p-avc and 720p-hevc to 720p-avc ?
I know that Big 4K movies are a PAAAAIN, but much smaller resolutions should be much easier right ? Let say a 4mbps 1080p h265 to 8mbps 1080p h264 or a 1mbps 720p h265 to 2mbps 720p h264 …
What do you think ? The plex Guys should add that in the guide.
Side note, is PLEX still using only bitrate to determine quality ? like it will transcode 4mbps h265 to 4mbps h264 instead of keeping the same quality with a higher bitrate ?
I’m slowly moving everything to h265 / HEVC. Some endpoints will play it natively of course, but like usual probably only a specific standard that you don’t normally have. Just running on a 7 year old Dell i7 and handles multiple streams well. So unless you’re running a NAS or something with a low end processor, it doesn’t seem to need much grunt in reality.
Also regarding your second question, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that these ‘auto’ bitrates for quality weren’t being reported correctly. I just play original quality wherever I can anyway as typically that should be the lightest load I think, unless you’re on a cell network or something.
i think it’s not important, because all newer processors offer hardware support -> so it makes no different ( 720p or 1080p ) as long as you have QSV or VCE.
@jjrjr1 said:
IMO Disk space is a lot cheaper than a cpu that can transcode multiple h265 streams…
Well… that may be right for your use case. We are speaking of 10-15-times the size using h264 instead of h265. This is unstoppable… so Plex should try all it can to be on-top of that wave. In two years from now, hardware using processors that handle h265 well will be inexpansive and standard… IMO.
With 8k on the horizon everyone else will be left behind.
Seen this happening before quite a number of times. Player devices grow old every couple of years. Servers do, too.
Yep, good point. I don’t think we’re going to see much 4k / 8k in 264 anyway? In that sense the space saving of 265 / HEVC is a bonus. Anyway, just putting it out there again, my Dell Optiplex 990 (which cost me NZD about $300, handles 265 very well. Haven’t had an issue yet even with multiple streams. I don’t do 4k, but most is 1080p. With 264 most things don’t require full transcoding anyway with many players being able to do direct (or perhaps just transcode the audio). Depends on the use case of your players, but I’d assume very little 265 direct playback to begin with. I don’t use hardware encoding as it limits to 2 simultaneous encode streams. As @Puschie says above, maybe hardware encoding is the answer for you though.
@Puschie said:
i think it’s not important, because all newer processors offer hardware support → so it makes no different ( 720p or 1080p ) as long as you have QSV or VCE.
GPU (Hardware) transcodes do not produce the same image quality and has some bugs in some formats … plus the 2 streams limit.
Im in the range of 8-10 remote plays peak and 6 remote plays (2-3 directs plays/streams) usual every nights, I plan to get at 10 usual (4-5 directs) during the year. With 18TB of quality content (250 Shows in mostly 720p, and 800 Movies mostly in 1080p). I just added 6TB of content in the last month alone. It would be a usge Space saver if I could reencode in h265 without compromising on the streams my Server can handle.
@Altheran I currently have about 10-13 remote streams with all my movies at 1080p. I gone over and seen the quality and they’ve told me the quality is better than 720p and not really that different from 1080p. So I say I wold keep using gpu hardware transcoding. If the 2 stream limits worry people than you can just buy a p2000 Quadro for like $400 for ulimited streams.
