Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

Bonzo: Mar 11, 2004; Just like Mama used to make it!

If you are looking for a new Android launcher, check out Projectivity. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.projengmenu&hl=en_CA&gl=US

I like it better than Wolf or F Launcher. It also preserves the ability to cast from a phone.

# ? Jan 7, 2024 20:06

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# ? May 17, 2024 07:12

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Bonzo posted:

If you are looking for a new Android launcher, check out Projectivity. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.projengmenu&hl=en_CA&gl=US

I like it better than Wolf or F Launcher. It also preserves the ability to cast from a phone.

Doesn't look compatible with my pixel 8.

Looks fuggin sweet though.

# ? Jan 7, 2024 20:38

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

EVIL Gibson posted:

Doesn't look compatible with my pixel 8.

Looks fuggin sweet though.

It'sade for Android TV, not your phone.

# ? Jan 7, 2024 20:47

Bonzo: Mar 11, 2004; Just like Mama used to make it!

yeah sorry, I should have specified.

# ? Jan 7, 2024 20:48

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

I went to plug in my shield TV today because I want to do some poo poo with VPNs that I can't get working on Apple TV and I found out two very annoying things:

1. The power cable isn't USB-C, it's proprietary.
2. I don't know where mine is.

Gonna try to get Nvidia to send me a new one but if they won't is there a good set top box that rivals the shield? I know lots of people just use the fire stick but I've used it at my in laws and I can't live with a UI that bad/slow.

# ? Jan 8, 2024 06:13

Splinter: Jul 4, 2003; Cowabunga!

prom candy posted:

I went to plug in my shield TV today because I want to do some poo poo with VPNs that I can't get working on Apple TV and I found out two very annoying things:

1. The power cable isn't USB-C, it's proprietary.
2. I don't know where mine is.

Gonna try to get Nvidia to send me a new one but if they won't is there a good set top box that rivals the shield? I know lots of people just use the fire stick but I've used it at my in laws and I can't live with a UI that bad/slow.

If you care about passing through all common surround formats, then literally a Shield is the only option

# ? Jan 8, 2024 06:24

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

prom candy posted:

in laws and I can't live with a UI that bad/slow.

Roku Ultra is the answer here

# ? Jan 10, 2024 06:05

Flowing Thot: Apr 1, 2023

Ended up buying an Apple TV 4k (3rd gen) before reading the OP that said to get a Shield. I don't really care about fancy audio formats because I'm just going to be using headphones via optical out of my tv. Is an ATV4K going to be just fine for me?

# ? Jan 10, 2024 06:31

prom candy: Dec 16, 2005; Only I may dance

Moey posted:

Roku Ultra is the answer here

They still make Rokus?

# ? Jan 10, 2024 06:32

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

Flowing Thot posted:

Ended up buying an Apple TV 4k (3rd gen) before reading the OP that said to get a Shield. I don't really care about fancy audio formats because I'm just going to be using headphones via optical out of my tv. Is an ATV4K going to be just fine for me?

Yeah if you don�t need specific audio formats, the ATV is a top tier choice. Especially if you have other Apple products.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 06:34

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

The "AppleTV doesn't play some audio formats" stuff is way overblown.

It won't natively play lossless TrueHD+ and DTS-HD from media on Plex without transcoding and converting it, which is a pretty niche use-case for the vast majority of users. Everything else about it is better than the Shield unless you need to sideload a cracked ad-free YouTube app or hate Apple or whatever.

VPN into Ukraine, sign up for YouTube Premium Family for $4 a month. It's great.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 15:02

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Doesn't it bitstream those formats so it's fine? You just dont see ATMOS on your receiver, who cares?

# ? Jan 10, 2024 15:11

FCKGW: May 21, 2006

The OP is just out of date. ATV had some bad file format issues but it easily fixed several OS updates ago.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 15:31

EL BROMANCE: Jun 10, 2006; COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬

Matt Zerella posted:

Doesn't it bitstream those formats so it's fine? You just dont see ATMOS on your receiver, who cares?

No, the primary issue is that it doesn�t bjtstream for whatever reason. The simplest of feature additions, but never going to happen it seems.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 15:43

chocolateTHUNDER: Jul 19, 2008; GIVE ME ALL YOUR FREE AGENTS

ALL OF THEM

prom candy posted:

They still make Rokus?

Rokus are the most popular streaming platform in North America.

FWIW, I also use Rokus because of the extremely simplistic UI. They are also a very good "parent" streamer because of that.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 16:24

Kibner: Oct 21, 2008; Acguy Supremacy

chocolateTHUNDER posted:

Rokus are the most popular streaming platform in North America.

FWIW, I also use Rokus because of the extremely simplistic UI. They are also a very good "parent" streamer because of that.

Can confirm. Both my mom and my partner's mom were able to use Rokus with little to no instruction.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 17:30

derk: Sep 24, 2004

Dr. Poz posted:

Checkout the TRaSH guides for setup. It points out a lot of setup related pitfalls, which seems to get close to answering the primary question. I don't think there's a consolidated feature-tour for the whole stack though, so to figure out full capabilities you'll have to play around.

When I started running Plex it was off my gaming desktop like others. Eventually I needed more disk capacity so I got a NAS and tried hosting Plex off that with my Xbox 360 for playback. I didn't know no better. Eventually I moved Plex over to a spare Windows laptop. I learned all about Transcoding but more importantly I learned about clients differing capabilities and that the best viewing experience was provided by Direct Play. That I should put all my effort into making transcoding as rare as possible by configuring Plex to not downgrade content and making sure my content was in formats easily played by my clients, both remote and local.

Docker is terrible on Windows. It was a resource hog and the arrs would absolutely drag rear end doing anything (and yes, I had my pathing setup properly in the arrs so the import was a file-move not a more expensive file-copy) but the ability to drop a docker-compose.yml on a machine and spin up my whole stack with a "docker compose up -d" is too much of a draw for me to ignore.

I bought a dell optiplex off ebay at the recommendation of this thread, installed Linux, docker copied my data over, spun it up and for the most part everything worked perfectly. The only problems I had that weren't my own setup changes was in transitioning Plex from Windows to Linux there are no clear instructions on how to translate Plex registry settings to Preferences.xml nodes, but a little experimentation will get you there.

I wouldn't go back to Windows on the server at this point because whenever I'm in the server dashboard, the system resource consumption is so much lower. I wouldn't go back to manual installation of this at this point because it's so time consuming in comparison. I had to take my path to get here though with a bunch of different things motivating decisions at each step.

The only thing I would recommend strongly is this: Buy a Dell Optiplex or something equivalent off eBay for your server if you're planning on buying some hardware for this purpose. Inexpensive, Intel QuickSync enabled, small form factor, comes with Windows if you want it. Not a lot of room for drive expansion though, so if you require the server to also be a drive host it's probably not the right fit.

I have yet to get the draw TO docker. maybe I just don't understand how to properly setup a docker container, seems easier to me to set up each service I use manually. Set up plex and all the *arrs years ago and they update and work flawlessly, albeit manually but still. I never seem to get containers to work properly, I don't know.

I run everything on a Ubuntu server with an Xeon and 16gb ECC Ram, older machine, but man just keeps chugging along fine. SSD for ubuntu and the services, 16TB currently of RAID 0 storage, 4x4TB

derk fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jan 10, 2024

# ? Jan 10, 2024 17:40

Motronic: Nov 6, 2009

derk posted:

I have yet to get the draw TO docker. maybe I just don't understand how to properly setup a docker container, seems easier to me to set up each service I use manually. Set up plex and all the *arrs years ago and they update and work flawlessly, albeit manually but still. I never seem to get containers to work properly, I don't know.

They're a lot of extra work for people who don't know how to operate linux/unix or who are deploying projects that are designed to be installed properly. Lots of people don't know how to do that or don't want to. They get snippy and call you elitist when you mention it. Lots of new projects are dumpster fires that barely run/have dep issues so using docker as the primary distro method makes sense. Some projects installed bare metal have weird deps and you have to add repos that disappear leaving you with package management issues down the line. I don't think there's a perfect answer to any of this.

I'm the kind of idiot running multiple linux vms on esx with most services installed on the base OSes, so I can't judge.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 17:49

chocolateTHUNDER: Jul 19, 2008; GIVE ME ALL YOUR FREE AGENTS

ALL OF THEM

I utilize docker to run Plex and all my *arrs, plus various other services.

Having said that, I know what Docker is and roughly how it works, but that's about it. Unraid makes it dead easy to just go onto their app store and get one running, for better or worse.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 17:51

derk: Sep 24, 2004

Motronic posted:

They're a lot of extra work for people who don't know how to operate linux/unix or who are deploying projects that are designed to be installed properly. Lots of people don't know how to do that or don't want to. They get snippy and call you elitist when you mention it. Lots of new projects are dumpster fires that barely run/have dep issues so using docker as the primary distro method makes sense. Some projects installed bare metal have weird deps and you have to add repos that disappear leaving you with package management issues down the line. I don't think there's a perfect answer to any of this.

I'm the kind of idiot running multiple linux vms on esx with most services installed on the base OSes, so I can't judge.

This. I have services all running on the base OS, I updated everything recently and it broke my rtorrent+rutorrent, I rarely use torrents these days so it was not a big loss but I have been slowly looking into what messed it up and trying to fix it.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 18:15

Talorat: Sep 18, 2007; Hahaha! Aw come on, I can't tell you everything right away! That would make for a boring story, don't you think?

Yeah the point of docker is to have an instance of the service that �just works� because it�s packaged with all its dependencies and can�t be fouled up by other changes on your system. Honestly I don�t get the docker hate, it�s dead simple to use.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 18:30

Kibner: Oct 21, 2008; Acguy Supremacy

I just view Docker as a way to install new apps without having to worry about conflicting dependency packages. It's also sometimes nice when you gently caress something up that it is easy to blow it away and try again without worrying about leftover artifacts.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 18:31

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

I hate docker, but I love containers. Thankfully Unraid masks most of that crap away.

If a native install works for you, go with god. There's no right or wrong way to do this.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 18:44

Super Foul Egg: Oct 5, 2005; Don't take me for an ordinary man

Spod-likes are more inclined to kick out against 'quick fix' systems that just hide all of the things actually happening because that's how you lose generational information into what the gently caress is happening when computers do things.

Unfortunately the people who hold these views are also, historically, the ones who have had their lunch money stolen over and over again by people having the bright idea of 'what if existing service X, but usable by normal human beings' so at this point it's kind of a stalemate for the nerd approach.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 18:59

withoutclass: Nov 6, 2007; Resist the siren call of rhinocerosness; College Slice

I use Docker for stuff I don't give enough of a care to learn how it works like Minecraft Bedrock or if some app only supports Ubuntu or whatever, otherwise I just install on bare metal and my package manager has never had a problem managing dependencies. Maybe if I ran all this on my primary machine I'd have more conflict type issues.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 19:25

derk: Sep 24, 2004

Kibner posted:

I just view Docker as a way to install new apps without having to worry about conflicting dependency packages. It's also sometimes nice when you gently caress something up that it is easy to blow it away and try again without worrying about leftover artifacts.

yea like my rtorrent+rutorrent problem. i updated a dependency that obviously broke it and i am lost at fixing it currently.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 19:38

Splinter: Jul 4, 2003; Cowabunga!

Corb3t posted:

The "AppleTV doesn't play some audio formats" stuff is way overblown.

It won't natively play lossless TrueHD+ and DTS-HD from media on Plex without transcoding and converting it, which is a pretty niche use-case for the vast majority of users. Everything else about it is better than the Shield unless you need to sideload a cracked ad-free YouTube app or hate Apple or whatever.

VPN into Ukraine, sign up for YouTube Premium Family for $4 a month. It's great.

I thought ATV doesn't support DTS at all? Which is a ton of movies if that's the case. If it now can handle DTS that's a huge improvement, but a lot of Blu-ray these days have the HD formats now.

Obviously not everyone has a home theater surround setup but it's an important fact to mention for those that do (same with Rokus and Google TVs etc) when talking Plex players. I wish someone had when I got my previous streaming device. I'd have an ATV if it handled all the movie formats, but the Shield works well for the most part too so it doesn't bother me much anymore.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 20:33

Quixzlizx: Jan 7, 2007

I didn't know much about Linux, and I didn't want to have to learn how to use Docker on top of that, so my services are all native (although I installed Plex and NodeJS as snaps for maximum troll factor). It took a long time, and with a ton of frustration, but I did learn a lot during the process about stuff like permissions/ownership/users/groups and using the command line, to the point where I uninstalled all the "kubuntu" packages from my serve since I was doing 100% of everything through SSH by that point.

I also documented and backed up everything, so if I ever have to restore, it should be a breeze in comparison, if not a breeze when compared to Docker.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 21:00

Kibner: Oct 21, 2008; Acguy Supremacy

Snaps are also fine because they are also self-contained, similar to Docker in that you don't have to worry about dependencies with them, iirc.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 21:07

Dr. Poz: Sep 8, 2003; Dr. Poz just diagnosed you with a serious case of being a pussy. Now get back out there and hit them till you can't remember your kid's name.; Pillbug

Matt Zerella posted:

Did they fix the audio sync issues on 4k HDR yet?

Circling back to this, I've definitely been encountering it with 4k HDR remux content, but not encodes. At this point I just set a +200ms audio offset when watching something. It's really obnoxious, especially as I've been leaning more towards remux lately.

derk posted:

I have yet to get the draw TO docker. maybe I just don't understand how to properly setup a docker container, seems easier to me to set up each service I use manually. Set up plex and all the *arrs years ago and they update and work flawlessly, albeit manually but still. I never seem to get containers to work properly, I don't know.

I run everything on a Ubuntu server with an Xeon and 16gb ECC Ram, older machine, but man just keeps chugging along fine. SSD for ubuntu and the services, 16TB currently of RAID 0 storage, 4x4TB

I feel like my original post explained my personal draw to it and value it gave, and others have already pointed out other advantages so I'll just underline how docker compose is really what attracted me. It's nice having a plain text file that defines all my home services. I can version it and refer back to it easily. Example of radarr/sonarr configs:

code:

  radarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
    container_name: radarr
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - my_network
    environment:
      - PGID=${PGID}
      - PUID=${PUID}
      - TZ=${TZ}
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ${CONFIG}/radarr:/config
      - ${DATA}:/data
    ports:
      - 7878:7878
  sonarr:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/sonarr:latest
    container_name: sonarr
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - my_network
    environment:
      - PGID=${PGID}
      - PUID=${PUID}
      - TZ=${TZ}
    volumes:
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - ${CONFIG}/sonarr:/config
      - ${DATA}:/data
    ports:
      - 8989:8989

If I had to manually setup containers via docker cli I might still do it but I'd hate it a lot more.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 22:01

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Dr. Poz posted:

Circling back to this, I've definitely been encountering it with 4k HDR remux content, but not encodes. At this point I just set a +200ms audio offset when watching something. It's really obnoxious, especially as I've been leaning more towards remux lately.

Shame but I've gotten so used to Infuse I stopped caring lol. I don't see the issue on my iPad when I'm traveling and use the official Plex client so that's good.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 22:33

withoutclass: Nov 6, 2007; Resist the siren call of rhinocerosness; College Slice

Kibner posted:

Snaps are also fine because they are also self-contained, similar to Docker in that you don't have to worry about dependencies with them, iirc.

I don't want to reinstall like half my system for a piece of software tbh. I get why they are convenient but I hate them.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 22:34

IOwnCalculus: Apr 2, 2003

derk posted:

This. I have services all running on the base OS, I updated everything recently and it broke my rtorrent+rutorrent, I rarely use torrents these days so it was not a big loss but I have been slowly looking into what messed it up and trying to fix it.

This was the kind of thing that bit me repeatedly back in the much earlier days of sonarr/radarr and the like.

At this point I also like it because it's an easy way to keep things off of the WAN, when running on a server that isn't behind any other firewall. Anything that doesn't actually need a port exposed to WAN just gets a 172.x.x.x IP that I can get to via Wireguard.

Also makes backing up configurations much easier since they're all pointed at subfolders in /opt, instead of having to sort out which sections of /etc I want to back up.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 22:35

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

Splinter posted:

I thought ATV doesn't support DTS at all? Which is a ton of movies if that's the case. If it now can handle DTS that's a huge improvement, but a lot of Blu-ray these days have the HD formats now.

Obviously not everyone has a home theater surround setup but it's an important fact to mention for those that do (same with Rokus and Google TVs etc) when talking Plex players. I wish someone had when I got my previous streaming device. I'd have an ATV if it handled all the movie formats, but the Shield works well for the most part too so it doesn't bother me much anymore.

Apologies, all DTS gets decoded to Multichannel PCM, which is uncompressed and doesn't require a transcode from the Plex server. This seems fine to me?

Corb3t fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jan 10, 2024

# ? Jan 10, 2024 22:58

EVIL Gibson: Mar 23, 2001; Internet of Things is just someone else's computer that people can't help attaching cameras and door locks to!; Switchblade Switcharoo

Kibner posted:

Snaps are also fine because they are also self-contained, similar to Docker in that you don't have to worry about dependencies with them, iirc.

I've been weary from snaps since it reads like if the snap app installs something like a popular ssl package , by default, will it upgrade that ssl or not until the public snap is updated?

I read documents and it looks like you can force that openssl package to upgrade but what about normal system updates?

Corb3t posted:

Apologies, all DTS gets decoded to Multichannel PCM, which is uncompressed and doesn't require a transcode from the Plex server. This seems fine to me?

How does it uncompress exactly? If it's uncompressed, raw PCM them all those streams get very large in bitrate size.

EVIL Gibson fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Jan 11, 2024

# ? Jan 11, 2024 00:15

teagone: Jun 10, 2003; That was pretty intense, huh?

Flowing Thot posted:

Ended up buying an Apple TV 4k (3rd gen) before reading the OP that said to get a Shield. I don't really care about fancy audio formats because I'm just going to be using headphones via optical out of my tv. Is an ATV4K going to be just fine for me?

Sorry, I haven't updated the OP in years lol. Keep saying I will but I never get around to it :effort:

That said, the Apple TV is one of the best Plex clients availble, it should suit you just fine.

# ? Jan 11, 2024 00:46

Splinter: Jul 4, 2003; Cowabunga!

Corb3t posted:

Apologies, all DTS gets decoded to Multichannel PCM, which is uncompressed and doesn't require a transcode from the Plex server. This seems fine to me?

I guess it sounds like it's fine for regular DTS other than the receiver not seeing the audio as a DTS stream for display purposes. But I think for DTS-HD Plex has to fall back to the compressed DTS stream when it decodes to PCM as I don't think Plex will decode DTS-HD to PCM (I believe due to licensing). You also lose positional information for movies that use DTS:X and I believe TrueHD Atmos as well (decoding this audio to PCM does not give the same result as passthrough).

So for those with nice/modern home theater audio setups I think it matters, and of any streaming apps, Plex users are the most likely to care about this (as were the ones that may have the bluray rips that have TrueHD Atmos or DTS:X while streaming services tend to send DD/DD+ Atmos which most hardware supports). It's worth mentioning and for those that do have nice object-based setups I don't think it's worth getting an ATV over a Shield, as the Shield still works well enough compared to an ATV that it's not worth sacrificing their home theater features over.

I do like the ATV though for people that are just using streaming services or don't have a home theater audio setup. It's what I got for my parents and what I'd prefer to use myself if it supported everything. One thing I do like about the Shield is getting emulators set up was less annoying than on the ATV, but that wouldn't be enough to get me to choose it over an ATV if ATV did have the audio format support.

# ? Jan 11, 2024 00:52

Well Played Mauer: Jun 1, 2003; We'll always have Cabo

My main beef with ATV and Plex is I notice audio sync issues in the Plex app especially in 4K, but infuse handles it better and also makes it easier to adjust delays. The Shield doesn�t seem to have the same problem so I usually use it for watching Plex and then the ATV for everything else.

# ? Jan 11, 2024 01:07

Corb3t: Jun 7, 2003

Splinter posted:

I loaded up a DTS-HD 4K HDR movie and both my Plex and Infuse played the audio no problem. I�m just trying to understand why converting a lossless DTS track to a lossless PCM track is such a big deal.

It�s worth mentioning Infuse does require you to pay to unlock DTS licensing within the app, but as far I can tell, LPCM is what gets outputted through both apps if you play a DTS-HD track.

Corb3t fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jan 11, 2024

# ? Jan 11, 2024 03:22

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# ? May 17, 2024 07:12

Splinter: Jul 4, 2003; Cowabunga!

From what I understand, with the DTS-HD you're essentially getting a lossy DTS version of the audio converted to PCM, not the lossless audio, as DTS-HD contains the info to do both lossy and lossless and Plex doesn't pay for the license to decode lossless (while I believe the lossy DTS decode is free). Not the biggest deal on its own, but some people may care if they've spent on a nice system.

With the lossless objected based formats (Atmos and DTS X) you're losing all the height info as I believe it just gets converted to 7.1 or something similar, so the receiver then can't do the atmos processing to figure out what speaker should play what. That's a bigger deal IMO for someone with an Atmos setup.

# ? Jan 11, 2024 03:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Plex Megathread: Your .ASS Is Getting Transcoded

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