How to Implement Efficient Plex HEVC Playback with the Least Quality Loss

Q1: "I've been using Plex for a while now, but I've hit a bit of a snag. My library was always in x264, however recently I started converting it all to x265 (HEVC). The problem is that Plex apps, such as on my Galaxy phone, and even my gaming PC, refuse to play in x265. All of these devices are well capable of playing x265, and even play them flawlessly when I physically put the copy on to the device and play it through an x265 capable media player. I've set all of them to Direct Play but they are still being transcoded to x264, which given that my server is only a dual core, makes buffering quite laggy. I've even paid for the Plex Pass on my tablet because I read about the N&I Plex Media Player, which supposedly has native support for x265. Even if I open Plex on my tablet, beam it to my TV that's running Plex for Opera, it still transcodes. I am at an absolute loss as to why this is happening and it's making my TV watching very painful."

Q2: "Really need help. Plex wont play HEVC h.265 .mkv remux files from my pc to plex app via roku stick+? When I try to play the file on my LG oled tv in another room on Roku stick+ plex app, it says video is unavailable, please check server. File is there, plays on my PC??? What am I doing wrong, is this not supported yet?"

--- from Plex.tv forum

A: Firstly, here's you can check out the hardware requirement of Plex Media Server, insufficient hardware might lead to time-consuming processing/decoding, and sometimes playback failures. Additionally, setting a streaming quality value lower than the content's bitrate will also result in slow video transcoding conducted by Plex.

Minimum specs:

· No transcoding - Intel Atom 1.2GHz

· Single 720p transcode - Intel Core i3 3.0 GHz

· Single 1080p transcode - Intel Core i5 3.0GHz

· Single 4K transcode - Intel Core i7 3.2GHz

Secondly, sure, Plex can play HEVC videos. Off-spec videos, however, especially those with high quality and high bitrate, may or may not be automatically transcoded on Plex, and we of course want to avoid that redundant process if yes. But HEVC is already a high coding-efficiency formats, thus lowering the video bitrate naturally brings about noticeable quality loss.

HEVC (H.265) offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate, but also makes the video harder to be decoded, and the support Plex has shown to it is not so satisfactory. Now, here's a good program come to the rescue to make you smoothly play H.265 video on Plex.