Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I’ve been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have fewer x265 options available, with low quality MeGusta encodes often being the only x265 option.
While x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback, its compatibility is much closer to x264 than the new x266 codec. Is there a reason many release groups still opt for x264 over x265?
For a Jellyfin server however it’s quite a boon.
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If your Jellyfin collection starts to grow big enough, and x264 transcoding on the fly is as easy as passing through the GPU these days…it’s pretty much a no brainer. You have small files, and if someone still needs x264 (which would need to be specifically a Firefox streamer, as I believe Chrome supports it, and the Jellyfin apps also support it if your computer/phone does), the transcoding on the fly can be done using about 1-2% of the server CPU. I did something like 12 simultaneous different transcodes once, and my oldish i5 9500T held its ground perfectly, I think it reached about 35% CPU at the peak of it.
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Well it’s a Jellyfin server. I bought a CPU that CAN transcode, for this specific purpose. Without hardware decoding, CPU usage scales quite quickly, but it could still hold 3-4 streams at 60fps I believe. At any rate, I bought this 2nd hand microPC with the specific purpose of being a Proxmox server with Jellyfin transcoding. And so, between having to consider further hard drive upgrades, or using the transcode function…I kinda choose the cheapest one since it’s at hand.
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Did you do something specific to play x265 on JellyFin? Last time I tried, the video kept crashing every 5-8minutes, even with a low bitrate threshold.
Which client? Works fine here
JellyFin App for Android TV (on a Shield)
There is an option to use an external player. So you could use VLC as an external player and use it. It would work better.
I tried that, but the result is the same (and progress doesn’t seem to be saved). Maybe it’s specific to the Shield or to my files
Hmmm what do you mean the video kept crashing? Where is your server set up? What are you using for OS? Is it bare metal, is it running in a Windows, in a VM, in a container?
In my case it’s running in a Proxmox LXC container (the container is running Ubuntu). I’m passing through the integrated GPU, as instructed in the Jellyfin docs. And then I enable Intel QSV transcoding on Jellyfin. The CPU consumption is close to negligible. Then again, you need an Intel CPU capable of x264 transcoding at decent rates. Anything after 8th gen should be able to do the trick (with this I mean, you can ALSO transcode whatever source to x265 on the fly, but that’s not a feature I’m actively using at the moment, as the resulting file is usually larger anyway). I’m using an i5 9500T, and I benchmarked something like 8 transcodes simultaneously to almost no impact. I think it was starting to be noticeable past 12 transcodes simultaneously. But that’s some heavy streaming there! That’d mean EVERYONE is connecting at once to your server using FF (I believe Chrome is x265 capable, and the apps also take x265 just fine if your phone/computer support it). So…in short, my i5 from a few generations ago is already overkill for x265