H.264 or H.265 - Plex

[AMD Lover]

So, the internet in my mind gives A LOT of conflicting and what seems like old, outdated and wrong info about the H.265 format. Everywhere I go the general consensus is to use H.264 because the former is not supported on all devices at this time however from my personal experience with my devices everything seems compatible?

 

Also, I have read a few places that H.265 is a resource hog, using the CPU very heavily. However, aside from the encoding in Handbrake before hand to H.265 when the video is streaming over the network via Plex the CPU is at idle for the most part.

 

Another thing to note; It seems my quality is higher and the file size is considerably lower, 8GB using H.264 and 5GB using H.265.

 

So, my question is what is the problem with using H.265. I'm looking to get this lined out and hopefully get some factual info in this thread to help me and other people in the future,

 

Thanks  

[79wjd]

A lot of devices DON'T support H.265, and in the case of those devices, the CPU on the server will just transcode the video, so it will still work. 

 

H.265 does also allow for much smaller file sizes without quality loss (so obviously there is a point where the quality is better but the size is still smaller).

[bomber916]

It really is a mixed bag on what devices support H.265 right now.  Chrome (last I checked) does not support it natively, but there are workarounds to this.  Android 5.0 and up supports H.265. The higher end Roku and newer Chromecast devices support H.265 while the cheaper or older devices do not.  

 

Plex is amazing in that it will automatically transcode the video into a supported format for the device, assuming your server is powerful enough, but transcoding is not easy on the CPU.  I personally went with H.265, mainly due to file size, but not because of HDD concerns, but INTERNET SPEED concerns.  I am running a E5 server processor with 16 cores though so it is able to easily handle 3 transcodes.

 

I would take inventory of the devices and users that will be using your Plex server, and decide how much transcoding is acceptable to you, how many transcodes you can run simultaneously, etc and make the decision based on that. Hopefully in the near future more devices will  support H.265.