The truth about 4K Transcoding in Plex

ah the age-old question should you transcode 4k media on your plex media server i've made my feelings pretty clear about 4k transcoding in the past but i never actually lined out the exact reasons as to why i don't like it [Music] what's up youtube jason here with bite my bits and in today's video i want to talk about wasting resources on your plex media server by transcoding 4k also giving your users or maybe even yourself a bad viewing experience so what does that mean jason why is it a bad experience and why am i wasting i don't know i don't ugh 4k transcoding you will have a 4k video file 4k four times the resolution of 1080p that means that your server has to work at least four times the amount to transcode the same video file that it would normally let's say a 1080 or 720 all the way down to a lower megabit file like two megabits per second at 720 as an example you got a 1080p file you got a 4k file this one is let's say 10 gigs this one is 60 gigs they're the exact same footage this one's just better quality the idea that you'd want to make your server work at least four times as hard to transcode media than it would on a 1080p to me is baffling you could have one of the most capable servers out there with the biggest baddest gpu you could find and you're still going to find yourself running into limitations trying to transcode massive quantities of 4k video files for example my main server loki the server that i actually was originally a ryzen now it's an x50 x99 system with the 5960x and it has an rtx 4000 card in it now that rtx card still has a limitation of i wanna say eight gigs of ram it might be six i'm pretty sure it's eight i found this on the web for how much ram does the rdx yes google just said eight transcoding to 4k stream can sometimes take up to two gigabytes of vram just to process it so depending on how well plex handles multiple trans codes i could easily run into a transcoding wall just on memory alone now i have a server that could probably do 30 or 40 freaking trans codes but yet if i try to transcode a 4k video file it's going to drastically drain the resources of my server which does not make sense it's just a dumb thing for me to do and this is why even though i do share my plex server with certain friends and family members they don't have access to my 4k library even though i don't have a very large 4k library it's still separate because i don't want them to transcode it what i do is i just keep two files a 4k and a 1080p file because wasting resources going from a 4k resolution video file all the way down to something like a 720p 2 megabit per second file that you might stream on your phone just doesn't make sense but wait there's more plex actually doesn't even handle 4k video transcoding very well as of making this video so there's like an added reason not to do this now i know a certain somebody who for the longest time shared 4k media with their friends and family in fact i don't even know if they still do it uh j derp yeah i'm calling you out bro but plex does not handle hdr to sdr tone mapping at all so what that means is that when you have an hdr 4k video file and plex transcodes it because the likelihood of somebody remotely been able to direct play your 4k video file is pretty low whenever plex transcodes this file it takes that beautiful hdr color and it washes it out to where it just looks all gray now some tvs and some clients might have the ability to decode this hdr information and make it look better but as a whole for the most part you're just going to get a grayed out video now based off what i know i think now that again i don't know but i think plex just doesn't care about hdr to sdr tone mapping because it's not really that big of a deal when it's kind of a dumb thing to do again that's what i think that's not their actual feelings i'm just putting that out there so since they may not actually care that much about hdr to sdr tone mapping they just haven't thrown a lot of resources at developing what they need to in their transcoder in order to do it efficiently i know that there's like some like beta things going on and they're like they've been dabbling or getting close to it but it hasn't been a high focus and really i don't blame him based off how much resources it takes to transcode a 4k video file down to something it just doesn't make sense to do it so i don't blame him for not focusing on it too much however my counter argument would be that it would be nice to have the ability to optimize use a built-in plex feature to basically pre-transcode your media files down to a lower resolution before somebody tries to stream it meaning that it would be nice if i could take a 4k video file drop it in the library and then you know optimize that video file to be a 1080p or 720p version that way anybody that i shared it with if they try to play it it would automatically either a default to direct plane that optimized video or b it would transcode off of that optimized video thus giving my server a lot less of a workload so even though plex might not be focused on hdr to sdr i feel like having that with the optimizer working great might be a good add-on wink wink plays but color mapping aside direct playing a 4k media file has a lot of variables and it's heavily dependent on your client and the video file you're trying to play on some clients if you want to do something like play subtitles for example the client itself may not be able to use those subtitle files directly thus requiring the plex media server to transcode and burn those subtitles into the video so for example my xbox one i think is probably the worst possible media player as far as file compatibility if i want to play subtitles on it which i haven't done in a long time because i just don't use subtitles it has to buffer and it has to transcode and it has to get burned into the video files from the server however if i were to have something like an nvidia shield which i i really need to get one of those i've had them then i returned them but i really they came out the new one anyways an nvidia shield is one of the most capable and compatible media clients out there it just can handle so much if you have something like that that doesn't require any special codecs or decoding or anything that won't force your plex media server to transcode something like the audio or the video and everything plays smoothly then you can avoid plex transcoding however one little variable goes wrong and your plex is just ramped up your colors are washed out i mean it's just not a good day so the moral of the story is transcoding 4k is a complete waste of horsepower yes you could say it's a good flex i'm all for the flex trust me it's like well i got the server to do it why not do it i get that totally get it but once you're done proving that you can do it it's really just kind of a waste of money to continue to do it it's a waste of your server's resources and ultimately is kind of pointless so that is why i never transcode 4k i don't share a 4k library and in the end i really don't even have that much 4k content of course that's also because my tv is old and it's not even 4k so but even if i did have a massive 4k library i would still maintain a 1080p version of that library just to make sure that i'm not wasting resources by transcoding 4k well guys leave any questions or comments you have about 4k transcoding in the comments section down below as always thank you for watching like and subscribe below and have yourself a good day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 65,858

Keywords: plex media server, plex, server, transcoding, 4k, hdr, sdr, hdr to sdr, tonemapping, colors washed, grayed out, hardware transcoding, plex transcoding, plex 4k server, plex 4k movies, best nas transcoding, plex 4k support, 1080p transcoding

Id: RwESpiW1ShA

Length: 7min 41sec (461 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020