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Internet Explorer posted:Is anyone doing a Plex/seedbox in the cloud? Storage seems to be the sticking point, making it pretty expensive. Was kind of thinking about getting a partial rack in a colo somewhere and going that route. Experimenting with a France-based one, costing me 17 Euros a month for a dedicated server with a terabyte of storage. I had something of an internal dedicated server but its parts are old and being flaky, and the replacement costs would represent quite a long subscription with the France-based solution. Only just signed up a few days ago, still getting things setup with it, but so far it seems to be a good solution to the problems I was having.
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Feb 26, 2016 00:51
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Bobulus posted:I guess I'm not seeing the advantage of hosting a plex server outside your house. Maybe you guys don't have monthly download caps, but I do, and doing lots of netflix streaming was enough to hit it. I imagine it would be similar for lots of outside-your-network plex watching. If I was limited I'd definitely keep my server internally, but I currently have unlimited and, at least for now, this makes the most sense. It's definitely a "your mileage may vary" thing. EDIT to elaborate, I also had significant issues during the summer due to power draw fighting with air conditioning units. A lot of weird gremlins can come into play if you do a dedicated server deal, although if you have an always on desktop with no real heavy usage it makes sense to just share off that. univbee fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Feb 26, 2016 |
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Feb 26, 2016 04:18
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EL BROMANCE posted:It sounds a neat idea, especially if you can stream to your home at full pelt and maybe share with a few friends, but based on the price for just a 1TB setup... I'm at something like 14TB at the moment and if it wasn't for a few drives dying it'd be about 20TB. I just think it'd cost me way more, sadly. Yeah, it's definitely an idea that can be worth considering for some, but is definitely not for everybody.
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Feb 26, 2016 15:42
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TheScott2K posted:Honestly, movie studios don't seem to truly "get" what 2.0 users and non-audiophiles are looking for. I want a 2.0 track where the loudest things that happen in the movie happen at the same volume as dialog. Because yeah, I don't want to babysit the remote. The kids are asleep 30 feet away, and I want to hear what people are saying. I don't need explosions to be louder than what people are saying. I don't need music to fill the room. One of the unusual benefits with iTunes digital copies is that Apple mandates a stereo track on the master files they receive, and every digital file includes a 2.0 track that’s generally a proper official mix along with a separate track for 5.1/7.1/Atmos if applicable. I’m also fine tuning a script to do this to a folder full of mkv movies: just pull the audio track and run it through an ffmpeg mixdown with per-channel volume adjustments, and mux the new track back into the mkvs as an alternate audio track. It’s a bit odd because the industry standard stereo mixdown gives full power to the left and right channels but only partial power to the center speaker. Since the LR channels typically have music and effects and the center typically has dialogue, you get that extreme dynamic range. Even just flipping the relative channel power (full power to center and partial power to side channels) goes a long way towards an audio track that’s way more comfortable for controlled-volume watching. Sure it’s not “canon” but neither is a movie from 1989 having a 7.1 surround sound track, and sometimes you just gotta watch a movie lazily like it’s airing on TNT randomly and not like you’re at a fancy dress premiere for the movie in a reference-tier cinema.
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Sep 8, 2020 04:42
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odiv posted:As long as we're wishing for stuff, proper subtitles would be very much appreciated. Closed captions aren't the same thing! code:
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Sep 8, 2020 04:58
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odiv posted:As long as we're wishing for stuff, proper subtitles would be very much appreciated. Closed captions aren't the same thing! Just to confirm what we're talking about, what do you mean when you say "proper subtitles" here? Do mean dialogue-only without things like sound effect/music indications and taking out the name of who's speaking when they're off-screen?
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Sep 8, 2020 12:05
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nexus6 posted:I just want consistent non-english subtitles tbh. Alien or made-up languages often have hard coded subs, but if I want subs for languages in a movie I don't speak (like Spanish or German) I've got to enable subs for all dialogue. Oh yeah, you need what are often referred to as “forced” subtitles. Yeah, that’s annoying to prep especially if you’re not intimately familiar with the movie/show. I wish MKV had a standard where you can say “if I enable English audio I want this subtitle track auto-enabled.” I’ve taken to doing burn-in renders, especially for movies where the subtitles have a specific look (Avatar being an obvious example). But that’s inconsistent too, some Blu-rays have a separate sub track for forced subs, some just have one subtitle track where certain lines have a “forced” flag enabled. I kind of wish the French closed captioning system caught on elsewhere since subtitles are color-coded based on what they are which makes pulling only certain things a snap (it’s something like white is on-screen speaker, yellow is off-screen speaker, red is sound effects and green is speaking in a foreign language).
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Sep 8, 2020 12:33
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I wonder if there’s a db of which movies have “foreign” subs and an indication of how the DVD/Blu-ray handle it.
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Sep 8, 2020 16:21
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Yeah it gets to be fucky if you can't get really specific or gently caress with it (e.g. make "forced" subtitles flagged as "zxx" or something like that.) I've legit resorted to just having split Plex libraries for anime between dub and sub (especially since I also want French dub/sub and that just gets way too messy).odiv posted:Yes I mean dialogue only. The name thing I could take or leave, but stuff like [speaking Thai] or [rap music] is what I'd like to see gone from English subtitles. For what it's worth, some subtitle editing programs have one-click tools to deal with this (it will purge any subtitles that are completely within brackets or parentheses and stuff like that).
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Sep 8, 2020 22:34
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What video codec and what sorts of bitrates? I'm assuming it's x264. Depending on how they're encoding they might be pinging too high a bitrate or otherwise going beyond a certain "level" setting for the encoding. For what it's worth, Blu-rays are constrained to Level 4.1 so you definitely shouldn't go above that unless you're specifically doing stuff like 4K, but you might even want to encode at Level 4.0 (sets a 25mbps cap on the bitrate) which goes a long way towards playback being a lot more reliable. You might also want to consider if your audio is in a format other than AAC or AC3. Might be worth doing a quick test with a converted audio track and see if that helps, like your file uses FLAC or DTS.
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Sep 10, 2020 04:52
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Carl Winslow posted:My Live TV isn’t working at all (just in time for NFL kickoff...probably should have checked that) and I have no idea why. My antenna is pulling about 40-50 channels, most with good signal, and the Hauppauge software works without issue (WinTV 8.5) so I know that’s not the problem. Plex is pulling everything and populates the guide without issue, but any playback doesn’t work at all. Any ideas? On iOS I’m getting error code 5000 when I try to play any channel. Was it working before? Also does it work if you play on a desktop? If memory serves, OTA is generally MPEG2 which iOS Plex doesn’t support natively.
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Sep 13, 2020 16:50
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Sonarr and Plex pull their episode breakdowns from thetvdb and that can be a good place to look to suss out what it wants because things get absolutely wild between Air order, Production order, DVD order, Netflix order etc. And for stuff that isn't an episode specifically you might have to put in a "Specials" folder with "S00E41" type numbering convention based on whatever thetvdb lists. Or put it in your "Movies" folder if you prefer and that's what it is.
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Sep 30, 2020 19:36
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Kingnothing posted:Does sonarr not have absolute numbering or anime support? Medusa works well with anime in that regard (there’s an “anime” toggle for each show), so I’m super surprised sonarr doesn’t support it. I could have sworn there was an "Anime" toggle in Sonarr when adding a show, but I don't know what it actually does.
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Sep 30, 2020 20:26
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If you only want one of either dub or sub and are willing to put up with duplicate files or nuke your existing files, you can script with MKVToolNix (e.g. via Windows commandline batch file/for loop) to modify what tracks are in each file (or even just keeping the file mostly as-is but changing which tracks are the defaults).
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Oct 3, 2020 23:51
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Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:Is there any way to get both episodes to show up properly in Plex? Here's one possible avenue for combining them. This isn't 100% guaranteed to work, it requires that both episodes be in the same format (if they have different tracks, like half has a commentary and the other half doesn't, this method might not work). - Do a 1:1 rip of the disc(s) with both episodes - Identify which .m2ts files in the BDMV\STREAM folder are the episode. Copy/move these files into a single folder and rename if necessary. For the sake of this example I'm going to pretend they're called 00001.m2ts and 00002.m2ts - Download the eac3to app, Google for it. Put it in the same folder as your .m2ts files - Run the following command: code:The only other option that I can think of off-hand would be to manually tamper with your Plex entries by sliding the later Season 4 episodes over by 1 "episode" and making part two S4E10.
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Oct 5, 2020 18:10
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Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:Thanks for all the helpful replies! I guess I'll just encode them to MP4. I was really hoping to keep them "untouched" because now I don't feel comfortable tossing the DVDs. I guess I can keep them in the garage or something. Depends on the source material. Basically you want to deinterlace for something that's meant to be displayed at 50fps (PAL regions) or 59.94fps (NTSC regions). Going to assume you're NTSC. The 50/60fps can only possibly be TV source material, but even then it's not always what they aim for (e.g. some shows are shot on film at 24fps and the DVDs are progressive scan and will actually render at 23.976fps). If the top of the Handbrake window that lists the source details says it's 23.98fps you can disable interlacing because it doesn't apply. When you're deinterlacing you have a few choices: - You can "unfold" the video to be 59.94fps - You can apply a deinterlacing filter and get a 29.97fps output. When deinterlacing you have a few options in terms of what happens with the image, including blending both fields together (usually gives a blurrier picture) or dropping one field entirely and only rendering the one (gives a sharper picture but you lose half the frames). There are also options like telling Handbrake to only attempt to deinterlace frames that look interlaced (if it detects comb patterns) but how accurate this is depends on source material, if you really dig you can fine-tune the detection. I don't know if this extends to live action shows (they may have fixed this by the time it mattered), but some FOX animated DVDs, especially the ones released in the early 2000s, are extremely fucky and will switch on the fly between progressive and interlaced and are a real challenge to get a "perfect" output from.
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Nov 4, 2020 21:14
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TheScott2K posted:loving Paw Patrol Yeah, everytime a "two half episodes" gets released I split it with MKVToolNix so Plex has the correct episodes.
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Nov 17, 2020 19:15
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Moey posted:Well, I think I figured out the bitstream thing. DTS-HD MA is encoded with a "lossy DTS" first, giving it a core first for more compatibility. According to wikipedia, first paragraph. Yeah both DTS HDMA and Dolby TrueHD have cores that are their old lossy DVD counterparts for compatibility. It could also be the PGS subtitles that are throwing it off. Some players don't behave unless all audio tracks are in either .AAC or .AC3 format, and all subtitle tracks are in .SRT format. If you want to invest a little time in figuring this out, use MKVToolNix to generate a file with the PGS subtitle files removed and see where that gets you. If that's still an issue, you can re-encode the audio to AC3 (XMedia Recode will let you do a fast copy of the file where it keeps the video track and only re-encodes the audio track).
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Dec 8, 2020 20:20
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Actually having an interesting time fine-tuning encodes for my parents' place out in rural bumfuck where 4 megabits/sec is pretty much the ceiling. Set up a non-4K FireTV Stick and have encodes going with the following settings which seem to work well: 720p using 8-bit x265 (10-bit isn't supported on the non-4K FireTV) 2-pass encoding at 3 megabits/sec average so there's a little leeway (I have the video at 2800 megabits/sec to leave room for audio) A vbv-maxrate of 3 megabits and a buffer size of 10 megabits Audio at ~128kbps AAC Stereo (while rare, if I do multiple audio tracks I lower the video bitrate average a comparable amount) Subtitles either burned in or, if optional, in SRT format Just encoding at Medium speed using Handbrake. Not sure if there are any other settings or adjustments worth investigating I used a Dolby Atmos demo disc for quick encode tests since there were action-packed 2-minute trailers for the tech on it, although my first encode was botched because it encoded with the core Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track and it turns out that just has a dude politely saying "hey you've got your poo poo setup wrong" on repeat.
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Dec 27, 2020 21:35
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Praxis Prion posted:Picked up a QNAP TS-230 NAS, threw in a 10TB WD drive, and copied all of my media over to it. How to I point my Plex media libraries to the folders on the NAS? If I click "browse for media folder", it doesn't populate the network location. If I manually put in the network address, "\\NAS40CCF8\home\Movies" for example, saving changes results in "your changes could not be saved". You will have to mount the network folder as a drive letter, I'm assuming you're using Windows? If so open File Explorer and hit the "Computer" tab along the top bar, there's a "Map Network Drive" option right there.
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Jan 1, 2021 15:14
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CopperHound posted:Have any of you worked out a work around for both pillarboxing and letterboxing at the same time on ultrawide screens that doesn't involve re-encoding all my media? Just a basic zoom option or the ability to route the video through madVR would be great. Does your media actually include the black bars in its source material? Are those 1:1 Remuxes from a Blu-ray or UHD Blu-ray? If you could somehow get Plex to support Avisynth scripts you could crop the black bars losslessly that way but I'd be very surprised if that worked and that could put serious demand on your CPU potentially. You might be better off just doing a really high bitrate re-encode of anything with an AR larger than 1.77 or 1.85:1 and using that.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:17
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Did a bunch of testing for Plex arcade over the past few hours. It's magic when it works (extremely low latency when used over a local network) but they launched way too hot, the implementation is janky as gently caress. It breaks a lot and when stuff isn't working there's basically no feedback telling you why (e.g. there are actually deceptively high system requirements due to the streaming technology being used, like you either need a gaming-class GPU or at least a 4th generation i5. My main server is a 3rd-generation i5 and doesn't work but acts like it will work so that took me a while to suss out). Sharing libraries works but any users must ALSO be subbed to the Plex Arcade pass so it's not really viable. I only got NES games working, too, none of the SNES cores I tried worked (you need a weird third party program running unsigned code to get working emulator cores for the most part). Have some in-Plex boxart. 
univbee fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 00:37
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It doesn’t support much right now: MAME Atari 2600, 5200, 7800 NES, SNES Game Boy, GBC, GBA Sega Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, 32X That’s it.
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Jan 27, 2021 03:42
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Warbird posted:People keep saying this but I’ve never really gotten my head wrapped around the whole scope of the matter. I assume people are either adding emulators with flags to launch a given rom as “games” for these programs to stream or they’re just up and streaming the emulator raw and using controllers or whatever to navigate the interface to them launch the roms? Either approach works, depending. Most emulators will work with commandline switches to auto-load a particular ROM. So you can create two shortcuts (not actual commands, just an example): "c:\bsnes\bsnes.exe c:\snesroms\supermarioworld.smc" "c:\bsnes\bsnes.exe c:\snesroms\linktothepast.smc" And then each of those can be independently executed, so you have a link that's just for "Super Mario World" and one that's just for "A Link To The Past" and you can manage those independently. And that's at it most basic, you can also in some cases have extra switches to, for example, load a different settings file for the emulator if you're playing with a different configuration for a particular game. I would do this with Steam shortcuts a lot so I could launch a particular emulated game and have it show that I was playing it on my Steam user profile and stuff like that.
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Jan 27, 2021 18:37
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AI Upscaling? It’s front and center in the root menu (like right below the shutdown menu options). That and Dolby Vision are the only things that set it apart from the old Shield IIRC.
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Jan 30, 2021 20:09
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Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:Ah I take it that option is only for 4k TVs? Or does it like upscale 480p stuff to 1080p also? It’s designed with 4K TVs in mind but it might still work for sub-1080p stuff on a 1080p TV. I think the only requirement is whatever you’re playing has to be at least 480p, sorry for your DBZ .rm fansubs from 1997.
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Jan 30, 2021 22:05
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Warbird posted:This is the first I’m hearing of any of this. Is this a shield only feature? Sort of. There are different upscalers that exist but Nvidia has a really sophisticated version that is pretty much straight magic. The Shield Pro just has that functionality built-in and it's also setup so you can enable or disable it or even do a split screen if you want a visual idea of what sort of a difference it's making. It has low-medium-high settings. Generally speaking, the higher the setting, the sharper the final image will appear, but the more there's a chance of artifacting or similar imperfections being introduced into the picture. It is definitely the best way to experience the majority of material that's 480p or higher while less than 4K without having to do something like manually re-rendering an upscaled version of your entire library. This could be a game changer for the "my dad's lovely internet" use case, too, since I can feed it a low resolution file and get something pretty drat good back. I might see if I can get a proper screen capture setup going. In the meantime here are some lazy pictures and videos I took of my screen, all files are 3 megabit 720p x265 videos, TV is 4K. White line divides the left side (no upscaling) with the right side (Nvidia's upscaling set to Low).   Even with a phone pic you can see the sharpness in the hair and wrinkles here.
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Jan 31, 2021 16:58
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I found some old 4x3 encodes of The Wire from back when the DVD was the best source material. There's an improvement but it's a little less impressive and also I think has a harder time with artifacting but I think a lot of that has to do with DVD being kind of a rough source to work from. I might do some testing later, I suspect you'd get better results if you had a Blu-ray and did a 480p encode from that than you would encoding from a DVD source.
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Jan 31, 2021 19:32
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HDR is my best guess as to what’s going on. Given your equipment is sub-4K I’m guessing it doesn’t natively handle HDR and that UHD MKV is going to be HDR. I forget if that set includes regular 1080p Blu-rays, if it does you’ll want to rip those instead. Weird that it’s working on one and not the other, maybe your living room being 720p is easier for your computer to manage? You should look at your server's dashboard to see what's happening too, it'll tell you if it's trying to transcode the video or direct play it. univbee fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Feb 10, 2021 |
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Feb 10, 2021 03:40
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Sonarr and Radarr work with a few different settings to determine whether or not to download something based on what you already have. There are quality profiles which do two things: First, it says what qualities you're interested in. So you can tell it you don't care about screening or similar pre-release copies, or say that you don't care about 4K or even 1080p or whatever. The other setting is that one of these quality profiles is flagged as a "cutoff". So here's how it works: Let's say you have an exhaustive set of profiles selected, so it'll attempt to download standard definition, 720p TV broadcast, 720p webrip, 720p Blu-ray, the same in 1080p etc. What will happen is that the searcher will grab whatever the highest quality you selected is, and attempt to download it. If that download fails or no file exists at that quality, it moves on to lower quality releases until it finds a download that works. Similarly, the standard definition or 720p TV rips are usually fast to post, and will download first, but when a higher quality version shows up a few hours later, say a 1080p webrip, it'll replace your lower quality download with that. That said, it won't do this if your threshold is set to 720p HDTV. Because the file you have is already that quality, sonar/radarr consider that to be good enough and won't attempt to upgrade its quality, even once the Blu-ray is formally out and clean rips of it start appearing online. Now you can tweak the profile settings based on expected filesize, so you can train it to know that you don't care for a 720p quality file that's over 5 gigs per hour, for example. And lastly, you can tell them to stop monitoring anything you know to be "good enough" quality. This is particularly useful for TV Series since you can also tell it to not monitor older seasons (which is useful because some shows get reuploaded fairly regularly and that can retrigger downloads you might not care about). I've only started using Radarr recently so I don't know if this works for everyone's workflow or is even a "best practice", but the only movies I have listed in Radarr are ones I'm explicitly looking to download or upgrade, and as soon as I know that I have a file at the quality I want I outright delete it from Radarr entirely (obviously not deleting the downloaded file with it). I think you have movies that are still listed but flagged as "don't bother looking for downloads of this, I don't care."
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Feb 18, 2021 19:46
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Sand Monster posted:What is the secret to prevent Windows 10 from restarting? It seems like the active hours setting allows you at least to prevent it in a specific window, but I'm unsure outside of that. You basically can't (at least not in an official capacity) without running the special Enterprise LTSB/LTSC versions of it. Because people were frequently disabling updates to avoid any sort of bother, a lot of nasty viruses were able to proliferate despite the exploits they relied on having been fixed several months prior, and users would then immediately blame Microsoft for Windows being insecure. Because of this, Microsoft changed course and now forces update installation and reboots on most versions of Windows 10 because the "nice" way wasn't working. You can postpone updates to a certain degree (with increasing allowances if you're running Win10 Pro or Enterprise, and further still if you're running a Windows Server to manage the updates going to the networked machines) but not indefinitely, and you generally have to do the postponements manually. The LTSB and LTSC versions of Windows 10 are special versions which are "locked" to a specific Windows 10 build version, and don't get any of the major updates they put out every 6 months. They also don't include Microsoft Edge (only IE11) or the ability to use the Windows Store and apps, since those force updates. They get 10 years of security updates, and you can actually disable specific updates (or all of them) outright so they are never installed. I'm not sure if there are practical and inexpensive methods of obtaining it for end users, you need an "Enterprise" Windows license which is typically a business level-only thing (and to be licensed officially requires you to effectively pay for Windows 10 twice, as you must install it to a PC that already has a Windows 10 Pro license (you're allowed Win10 Home licenses if you're a non-profit)), the notion being that they're the only ones who might have a plausible reason for keeping a locked version of Windows, and at least in theory are managed by IT people that have some notion of what they're doing (lols go here). I'm pretty sure there are ways to "break" the normal versions of Windows 10 to avoid auto-installing updates but this goes outside of how the OS is designed to work so ymmv if it eventually results in poo poo getting horribly broken and requiring a full reinstall.
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Mar 1, 2021 15:06
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forest spirit posted:I'm only now realizing how terrible playing anything with rear end/ssa subtitles on plex for android is (nvidia shield tube). And by terrible I mean "it can't do it" Newer subtitle software can re-save the subs as srt, or you can find srt files elsewhere. You don’t even need to remux them, you can have them in the same folder with same filename as the video file and Plex will associate them.
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Mar 15, 2021 20:27
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OldSenileGuy posted:Speaking of subtitles - is there a database website anywhere that tells you whether foreign dialogue in a movie is supposed to have subtitles or if it's intentionally non-subtitled? I’ve found forum threads and the like where people compile lists but they’re nowhere near exhaustive, and exceptions can creep in, like there are a few movies I can think of where the US DVD/Blu-ray has the English text baked-in but international (sometimes even Canadian) releases don’t. The best bet I’ve found is to get AMZN or similar webrip files, as those are always baked-in if needed.
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Mar 16, 2021 00:44
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Elephanthead posted:Ok but windows update restarted with a splash screen that wanted clicked before any other processes were allowed to start Run the command "control userpasswords2" Uncheck "users must enter a username and password to use this computer".
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Mar 21, 2021 22:32
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No need. They asked for a solution to the login screen, and they received it since there's a proper way to accomplish this without breaking the OS. Ticket closed. I'll add an addendum that the auto-login account should be a local account that isn't bound to a Microsoft account, and I'm assuming that server is headless and doesn't hold anything sensitive should someone break in and steal it, but that's a detail.
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Mar 21, 2021 23:47
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For some reason, Plex defaults to like 2 megabits/sec as a quality for watching remotely if you don't explicitly go into your account settings to change the default. Even with this change there are certain scenarios where direct play won't be an option because of some incompatibility between your media file and your playback device. Video codec - If you're using x265 encodes your streaming devices have to be pretty recent, especially if encoding beyond 8-bit quality, and this won't direct play within a computer's browser window (you'll have to use the app). If you're encoding from scratch and not encoding in 4K resolution, you probably want to encode x264 with Level 4.0 restrictions to maximize compatibility (this caps the bitrate and some other stuff to sane values to ensure compatibility with hardware accelerated devices). Audio codec - AAC-LC is recommended to avoid playback issues, but AC3 should work on most devices along with EAC3. DTS and the various flavors of lossless are spottier for support and not ideal for Plex. Subtitles - This can be tricky depending on what you're working with, ideally you want subtitles to either be burned-in (so can't disable them and everyone can see them), or if you want them to be optional you ideally want them in SRT format which restricts you to pretty basic subtitle formats, so limited position and color options and no overlay, font or animation options to speak of. This can admittedly be a bit of a slog to get reliably because DVDs and Blu-ray subtitles are technically pictures so can only be converted via OCR which tends to get confused by things like numbers, ambiguous characters like capital i's and lowercase L's, and spacing for fonts using italics. This makes them somewhat error-prone and it can require some doing to find reliable subtitles in SRT format online especially for Anime which tends to have more advanced subtitle formats like .rear end files, and different sources can have different timings (e.g. some movies were released on Blu-ray in Europe first and a lot of  stuff uses that as a baseline as a result, but there might be a second or two of black video before the "movie" properly starts on that version that don't exist on a North American source or vice-versa).By and large, an .mp4 or .mkv file that's just an x264 video track with Level 4.0 restrictions, audio using the AAC-LC codec (can have multiple audio tracks, that's fine), and optional subtitles in .srt format only (again, can have multiple and it's fine) should direct play on any device that has the slightest business running Plex in this day and age, with the exception of the PS5 whose Plex app is just completely hosed to hell for some reason. I have also noted that at least the "Watch Together" functionality tends to not work with direct play unless you're full blown port forwarded to your Plex server. univbee fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 19:54
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The problem with 4K is the HDR tone mapping which is nontrivial to convert to SDR. Plex has options to leverage hardware acceleration for it but said hardware has to be fairly recent, not sure if it's possible to get capable hardware for $300.
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May 16, 2021 16:35
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Yeah, I feel like if you're playing 4K media and it's transcoding you're doing it wrong.
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May 16, 2021 16:41
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Sneeze Party posted:As far as 4k goes, it looks like it's possible to pre-transcode them and just have smaller versions of 4k content for people who don't want to stream the 4k media directly. And that seems like a fine idea, if it works. If you mean Plex's automated-ish thing, it's flakey with a large library, I think overall you're probably better off just making them yourself manually if you can handle it (you can automate a lot of it with separate software, like auto-encode any files that land in a folder kind-of thing). You can stack multiple files for the same media of a different quality that can be used instead of transcoding, too. This will work within the same library relatively transparently if the files are done right, or you can do multiple separate libraries which can be useful especially in the case of 4K and non-4K media, and also x264 and x265 if that's a situation that comes up. Due to weird circumstances with a terrible internet connection at my dad's place I have three qualities I do for files: - 4K HDR10 (or SDR if that's as good as it gets), whatever will stream to my equipment without transcoding (usually involves ensuring the subtitles are SRT format and the audio is AAC, AC3 or EAC3). - 1080p SDR with x264 codec, usually fairly high quality-bitrates but keeping the bitrate cap below 20 megabits per second for video + all audio tracks - 1080p SDR with x265 codec at a low bitrate (I generally do a 2-pass encode with 2.8 megabits/sec for the video and 128kbps AAC stereo for the audio, to keep things at 3 megabits/sec which is the highest bitrate the bad internet connection will stream reliably) For SDR stuff I generally do my encodes from an SDR-native source (so not from the 4K usually. Generally from a normal Blu-ray encode), just to avoid any shenanigans with that. Sometimes I'll also do the low bitrate encodes at 720p but with the same setting. The image is lower resolution but can hold together better with less artifacting, which is preferable for some things. Most people getting into 4K media need to do at least the first two groups, and may need to do custom extra groups for sharing with particular audio/subtitle formats if the people being shared with need help to avoid transcoding and stressing your Plex server.
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May 17, 2021 02:26
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 13:50 |
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Transcoding is always done by the server, not the client, which makes sense since the main reason to transcode is because the internet is too slow to get the original quality file. Basically Plex allows for something called "Direct Play" which will bring your video and audio across if it's in a codec your end device supports directly and not at a bitrate beyond any cutoff that's set up. Video will get re-encoded if it's in a codec that isn't supported by the client, for example x265 video is only supported by newer devices that generally also do 4K playback, and isn't supported by Plex via a web browser. Video also gets re-encoded if you're trying to use graphical or advanced subtitle formats, assuming you're using optional subtitles at all. Audio similarly gets re-encoded for end devices without codec support. Generally you have to stick to AAC Stereo, basic AC3 or EAC3. Due to stricter licensing requirements, DTS and lossless formats typically won't direct play even if those formats play otherwise in other ways (e.g. if the device will play DTS or lossless on a Blu-ray disc).
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May 18, 2021 00:59
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