Happy holidays, forum users! We’ve got something special in store for you with this release: it enables hardware transcoding for Windows, macOS, and Linux for Plex Pass users. Using hardware transcoding reduces CPU usage and power consumption, and may substantially improve transcoding performance.

This is a special forums-only preview release; the changes in this build will be included in a regular release once any new issues are handled.

Hardware transcoding requires a 64-bit Intel CPU on Linux, ideally from a recent generation (Haswell or later), and will use the primary graphics adapter on Windows and macOS.

The only supported codec for encoding is H.264.

On Linux and Windows, decoding of both H.264 and HEVC are supported. On macOS only H.264 is supported.

Hardware-encoded video may not have the same quality as software-encoded video.

Please test this version with a variety of different media file formats and clients. If you notice any new issues, please respond to this discussion instead of starting a new one, and include your Plex Media Server logs and a sample file that reproduces the issue.

If you’re running Windows, you should always uninstall preview releases before installing another preview release or an official release. This won’t affect your library or personal data at all, and it will work around some Windows installer-related issues.

EDIT: These links have been updated to point to a new beta (build 1.8.1.4140).

Download links:

Release notes (1.4.0.3173):

Known issues:

At the moment we only support Intel graphics for hardware decoding. You can try using another graphics adapter, and it may or may not work. We’re interested in hearing about your experiences either way.

EDIT: Release notes (1.4.0.3224):

NEW:

(macOS) OS version 10.8 is no longer supported. ( #6155 )

FIXES:

) FIXES: (Windows) A memory leak in the transcoder.

(macOS) Transcodes targeting resolutions lower than 480p broke with hardware encoding.

(macOS) Transcodes with Matroska output (Chrome, PMP…) weren’t working on some hardware.

EDIT (by StSimm1): Release updated onto a 1.6.0 base (see 1.6.0 release notes)

EDIT (by StSimm1): Release updated onto a 1.8.1 base (see 1.8.0/1 release notes) with various bug fixes and fallback support

EDIT: In order to support hardware transcoding on Linux, you’ll need to add the PMS user to the “video” group. You can do this by running usermod -aG video plexmediaserver as root, substituting “plexmediaserver” for the name of the Plex user on your system. Future versions will handle this automatically on install or upgrade.

as root, substituting “plexmediaserver” for the name of the Plex user on your system. Future versions will handle this automatically on install or upgrade. EDIT 2: If you’d like to use this preview with Docker, see this post for installation details.

The source code of the transcoder is available here.