2017 Base i5 struggling with Streaming 4K Plex

[SnowLucas]

Even if I need to re-encode the files I'm unsure how to do that and still retain the 4K resolution, as all problems would be solved this way given that my TV can handle the HVEC files.

Oh and my iMac is serving as the Plex Server, everything else connected to it are clients.

I believe if you had a 4K HEVC file with a Dolby digital soundtrack (AAC) it would play natively on the Xbox one s and in 4K. Pretty much any other audio track would need to be transcoded by your plex server before being played on the xbox.

As you have discovered transcoding 4K HEVC is not working for you as your iMac can't do it fast enough, at least this is what it sounds like is going on. From what I can find even though High Sierra will introduce hardware decoding for your iMac this may not be implemented into the plex media server so might not actually help going forward.

You could probably re encode the files with Dolby digital audio and passthrough the video part. As I said before if I was determined to play 4K HEVC files, today, I would buy something like the nvidia shield which would not have this issue. Plex is great but at the moment I'm not sure 4K HEVC is really a good idea unless you have a client capable of playing it natively. If the Xbox one s can't play even DTS natively then it's a pretty poor solution.

 

[c613m]

I believe if you had a 4K HEVC file with a Dolby digital soundtrack (AAC) it would play natively on the Xbox one s and in 4K. Pretty much any other audio track would need to be transcoded by your plex server before being played on the xbox.

As you have discovered transcoding 4K HEVC is not working for you as your iMac can't do it fast enough, at least this is what it sounds like is going on. From what I can find even though High Sierra will introduce hardware decoding for your iMac this may not be implemented into the plex media server so might not actually help going forward.

You could probably re encode the files with Dolby digital audio and passthrough the video part. As I said before if I was determined to play 4K HEVC files, today, I would buy something like the nvidia shield which would not have this issue. Plex is great but at the moment I'm not sure 4K HEVC is really a good idea unless you have a client capable of playing it natively. If the Xbox one s can't play even DTS natively then it's a pretty poor solution.

Yeah this is exactly what I'm trying. Using MKVTools I just did one of the movies that didn't work and changed the Audio Codec to AAC, and works flawlessly on my Samsung KS8000 (no CPU hit). On the Xbox One S, still transcodes and hits my iMac (Huge CPU hit).

So really, if all I have to do for the moment is use this to change my 4K files' audio, no biggie while my collection is not that big...yet.

Xbox One S remains a mystery to me, I guess I'd have to fully encode to x264 which I don't feel like doing.
[doublepost=1498687143][/doublepost]I just wanted to thank you guys for helping me out, I know it's not the Plex forum and I appreciate all the feedback and I seem to have found a method to do what I need even though it's not ideally easy like continuing to use Plex App on Xbox One S...

Here's the funny thing, as I was testing on my TV, I saw a software update for the TV, figured sure, it only makes things better usually... LOL it no longer plays my 4K files (recognizes them now as .mpg)... like seriously? Thankfully I can actually use the Plex App on the TV itself, but just my luck that I found the native player worked flawlessly and that goes to ****. Haha oh life is funny sometimes.