TVS-473 struggling with Plex 1080p

[gggplaya]

I only transcode for space, not for compatability. Both my KODI and INFUSE play everything I throw at them. A typical blu ray rip is about 20-50gb, with most newer movies around 40+gb. 40GB per movies is only 25 movies per 1TB of disc space. With my movie collection, i'll easily exceed 20TB of space if I were to leave them in their native compression.

So I transcode each movies to around 10GB or less, TV series are about 2GB per episode. So I can get another 100 movies per 1TB, which gives my NAS plenty of room to grow, considering I use 6TB disks in raid 5. I can't tell the difference in picture quality between my 10GB transcodes vs the original 40gb rip. I even did a blind test on my 65" tv with a few friends, they couldn't give me a consistent answer as to which was the original.

I realize not everyone does this, but if you are going to transcode to use a reasonable amount of space, then you might as well transcode to a format your sony will like.

[dolbyman]

space is fair enough .. for space I would go for x265 nowadays

I am a little pis*ed off at Samsung though .. I recently played a 50GB (2hours 4k HDR) movie and it was skipping like crazy on my samsung tv .. I though my NAS was too slow .. no, Samsung only put 100MBit network ports in their TV's (in 2017?!?!) anyways I switched to the internal wifi (AC) and the wifi 800MBit connection (less than half effective I guess) seemed to cope with the stream just fine

[gggplaya]

The problem with H265 are the clients arent' all fully compatible. My tablets struggle(software decode), the apple tv doesn't do well at higher bitrates(software decode), and only a few KODI boxes offer hardware decoding. The raspberry PI3 with KODI I use in my car for the kids can only do software decoding. Once client support for H.265 becomes better, then i'll switch as i'll drop my space usage in half. I tried a 5GB h.265 movie on my laptop connected to the TV, it still looks really good, very negligible loss in quality. But for right now, all my movies have to be fully compatible with all my devices for the family, in which h.264 has the broadest compatibility.

[dolbyman]

I guess all my stuff is newer

Samsung TV (KS8000)
Atom X5 compute stick (running KODI)
Android Box with S912 AMlogic chip (running KODI)

all do x265 just fine

[gggplaya]

I don't think any tablets support H.265 yet. Tablets are a must, as it saves me from having to buy more tv's for the house. Plus they're portable and can be used outside in the patio.

The family also just doesn't like KODI. I'm the only one in the house that uses it. Infuse is much nicer, but apple tv isn't 4k yet, so h.265 is only software decoded.

[JonnyL-TVS473]

Latest update.
It looks like we have a result. I downloaded handbrake and encoded the original Blu-Ray MKV rip to 1080p/30fps and Dolby Digital 5.1 640kps and ran it on the TVS-473 on 4 different household devices - iMac through Ethernet, iPhone over wireless, Sony Bravia through Opera Plex and further Sony Bravia through PS3 Plex. The CPU on the TVS hardly fluttered - running on average 14%. This is obviously far better than the full transcoding I had originally had it doing on 36GB files. The files now are around 6gb each and the picture and sound quality is good enough to my eyes.

Thanks for all the input and tips. I have learnt a great deal about containers, codecs and video streaming over the past few days.

[Trexx]

Glad that your issues have been resolved.