As the most powerful console yet, the Xbox One X is designed for immersive true 4K gaming which combines 2160p frame buffers, High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut into a pristine visual package. Apart from entertaining yourself on Xbox One X by playing 4K games, you may also wish to enjoy personal downloaded or recorded 4K video on Xbox One X. How about watching local 4K video on Xbox One X?

Play 4K video on Xbox One X via USB or Media Server?

Although the Xbox One X has the built-in media player app and also three USB 3.0 ports, however, the bad news is that Microsoft has representative confirmed that the Xbox One X can not play 4K video files or 4K HDR video from USB media. The good news is that Xbox One X supports 4K content playback via the popular streaming video apps Plex Media Server. As long as the 4K content meet the following standards, you can direct stream the 4K videp to Xbox One X without Plex transcoding.

- Resolution: 4096×2160 or smaller

– Video Encoding: H.265 (HEVC; both 8-bit and 10-bit) and mpeg4

– The content is being Direct Played

– No subtitles are enabled

Play unsupported 4K video on Xbox One X via Plex

From above information, we can see that only 4K content with a different encoding such as H.264 will not be played at 4K and will instead be transcoded down to a maximum of 1080p by Plex Media Server. However, it is well known that transcoding 4K content can be very CPU-intensive process, if your computer’s CPU is not powerful enough to keep up with transcoding your media, you might not have a very good experience and you will notice pausing or buffering as the Plex app waits for the server to catch up.

Related article: Play MKV on Xbox One S | Play MP4 on Xbox One S | Play H.265 on Xbox One

Best way to transcode 4K video for Xbox One X Streaming via Plex

To get a smooth 4K video streaming experience on Xbox One X via Plex, it would be much ideal to transcode 4K video to Xbox One X Plex app direct playback 4K H.265 listed above with a third-party 4K Video Converter - Pavtube Video Converter. The program has full importing support for 4K video wrapped different container file formats such as AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, MKV, MXF, TS, XAVC, XAVC S, etc and compression codec like H.264, H.265, Prores, etc. Thanks to its batch conversion mode, you can load multiple 4K video into the application for conversion at one time to save your precious time.

The program can assist you to easily encode unsupported 4K video to Xbox One X plex app direct playback 4K H.265 codec with super-fast encoding speed thanks to its hard-ware encoding acceleration function. You can get up to 30x faster H.265 codec encoding speed as long as you run your computer on Maxwell (GM206) or Pascal based Graphic cards that supports Nvidia NVENC technology.

To get better output file quality for Xbox One X, you can flexibly adjust output video and audio profile parameters such as video codec, bit rate, frame rate, resolution and audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc according to your own needs.

For Mac users, please go to download Pavtube Video Converter for Mac to perform the conversion on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks, etc.

Step by Step to Transcode Unsupported 4K Video for Xbox One X Streaming via Plex

Step 1: Load unsupported 4K video.

Download the free trial version of the program. Launch it on your computer. Click “File” menu and select “Add Video/Audio” or click the “Add Video” button on the top tool bar to import unsupported video files into the program.

Step 2: Define the output format.

Clicking the Format bar, from its drop-down list, select Xbox One X plex app playable 4K H.265 file formats “H.265 HD Video(*.mp4)” under “Common Video” main category.

Tips: Click “Settings” on the main interface to open “Profile Settings” window, here, you can flexibly adjust the output profile parameters including video codec, resolution, bit rate, frame rate, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc as you like to get better output video and audio quality.

Step 3: Enable GPU Encode Acceleration.

Click “Tools” > “Options”, in the opened “Options” window, click “Acceleration” menu, then check “Enable GPU Encode Acceleration” option so that the program will accelerate conversion speed when encoding 4K video to H.265 codec.

Step 4: Start the final conversion process.

After all setting is completed, hit the “Convert” button at the right bottom of the main interface to begin the conversion process from 4K video to Xbox One X Plex app direct playback H.265 video.

When the conversion is finished, click “Open Output Folder” icon on the main interface to open the folder with generated files. Then add converted files to Plex Media Server for streaming to Xbox One X smoothly.