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I'm skeptical that you are doing much video transcoding anyway. 1080p is supported on must devices now, and h264 is best buddies with 1080p content - a codec supported even on washing machines. Audio may be transcoded more often.
Not a huge amount of transcoding happening, but some for old Chromecasts and some for low bandwidth like when I was out of the country a few weeks ago watching from a heavily throttled cellular connection. Most of my collection is h264, but I've got a few h265 files here and there. I am by no means recommending my setup as ideal, but it works okay.
Absolutely, whatever works for you. I think its awesome to use the cheapest hardware possible to do these things. Being able to use a media server without transcoding capabilities? Brilliant. I actually thought you'd probably be able to get away with no transcoding at all since 1080p has native support on most devices and so does h264. In the rare cases, you could transcode beforehand (like with a script whenever a file is added) so you'd have an appropriate format on hand when needed.
Most of my content is h265 and av1 so I assume they are also facing a similar issue. I usually use the jellyfin app on PC or laptop so not an issue but my family members usually use the old TV which doesn't support it.
AV1 is definitely a showstopper a lot of the time indeed. H265 I would expect to see more on 2k or 4k content (though native support is really high anyway). My experience so far has been seeing transcoding done only becuase the resolution is unsupported when I try watching 4k videos on an older 1080p only chromecast.
What do you mean by showstopper? I only encode my shows into AV1/opus and I never had any transcoding happening on any of my devices.
It's well supported on any recent Browser compared to x264/x265... specially 10bit encodes. And software decoding is nearly present on any recent device.
Dunno about 4k though, I haven't the necessary screen resolution to play any 4k content... But for 1080p, AV1 is the way to go IMO.
- Free open/source
- Any browser supported
- Better compression
- Same objective quality with lower bitrate
- A lot of cool open source project arround AV1
It has it's own quirks for sure (like every codec) but it's far from a bad codec. I'm not a specialist on the subject but after a few months of testing/comparing/encoding... I settled with AV1 because it was comparative better than x264/x265.
Showstopper in the sense that it may not play natively and require transcoding. While x264 has pretty much universal support, AV1 does not.. at least not on some of my devices. I agree that it is a good encoder and the way forward but its not the best when using older devices. My experience has been with Chromecast with Google TV. Looks like google only added AV1 support in their newest Google TV Streamer (late 2024 device).