@chyron8472 You’re not understanding the use here of Kodi.
You install it then immediately go to video addons and install Plex for Kodi. You can also setup Kodi to auto launch the plex addon. So once setup it’s not really like you’re using Kodi. You’re not setting up libraries or anything else in Kodi. It’s just a shell for Plex to run it.
This will work on cell phones, tablets anything that Kodi runs on. You can visit the appropriate section of the website to learn all the good reasons to do this instead of using a native Plex Client.
@sremick said:
I stopped caring about GPU transcoding. The circumstances where it can be set up to actually work are too restrictive (and exclude my setup) and even when it works, the quality is less than CPU transcoding. Considering the size of my screen, I’m not willing to sacrifice video quality by shifting money from CPU to GPU.
Not sure where you got your info from. For real time transcoding hardware can outperform CPU for quality purposes. Forget everything you’ve read in forums and stuff where guys break things down by the image clip to show a minute bit of more detail in the cpu encode that took 10 times longer to do.
What we are talking about here is a transcode that must take place faster than the client can play it. So better than 1:1 not 5:1 or 2:1 like you can achieve offline looking for every little detail.
What you have to consider is what happens if your Plex server has to transcode 2 or 3 sessions. Basically that’s half to 1/3 the time of the play length. You just can’t get high quality CPU based transcodes that way.
Now take the GPU encode that was a bit worse then the offline transcode where you could spend 3 times the movie length getting it perfect. The GPU can do this same quality at better then real-time. Not only that but it can probably handle 3 or 4 of these without a quality loss like you’d get on the CPU side.
Now compare the CPU vs GPU quality while it’s transcoding in real time with a couple of streams playing and come back and tell us the HW transcode isn’t any good.
As others have said if you let Plex transcode your media for your big screen TV then you’re giving up a lot of quality anyway.
Also worth noting that not all CPU/GPU transcodes are created equal. GPU has come a looooooong way. Adobe’s Mercury engine is proof of that. Especially if you have a Quadro…
