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h264 -> vp8 Transcoding for Chrome


binko

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First of all, thanks for this great software!! Looked at Media Browser quite a long time ago but I continued using plex. Now I installed emby and I really prefer its concept. 

I'm using a pretty slow windows server, so a performance orientated transcoding is really important for me.

 

When I play a mkv-H264 video on the web client (latest chrome) it's transcoded to vp8 and thereby isn't watchable at all. The same video played on Chromecast (via the emby server) or played on the plex webinterface (via the plex server) stays H264.

 

What is the reason behind this. Does this happen by design, caused by a misconfiguration or is it just a known issue.

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  • 2 weeks later...
binko

Too bad, looks like nobody wants to answer my question. I would really like to understand that issue, and and get to know whether it's going to be solved in the near future or not, before I completely switch over to emby and make a subscription.  

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we only use vp8 in chrome and sometimes firefox. everything else is h264

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Karbowiak

we only use vp8 in chrome and sometimes firefox. everything else is h264

 

But why? If the video is already h264, and all it needs is to fix the audio, wouldn't it be more resource friendly to just transcode the audio and pass along the new audio stream and the old h264 video stream?

Seems silly to throw the h264 stream out the door and encode it to vp8.

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the desktop editions of those browsers don't have native support for formats that work well with transcoded or remuxed content on the fly. there is fragmented mp4, easy to implement but not officially supported. there is mpeg dash and hls, but not simple to implement without native support in the browser. but we have found a way using the media source extensions api to bring these formats to IE and Chrome desktop editions. But firefox will have to wait until it adds support for MSE. Your statement seems as though you probably think it's a very simple thing, but it is much more complex than you realize.

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Karbowiak

the desktop editions of those browsers don't have native support for formats that work well with transcoded or remuxed content on the fly. there is fragmented mp4, easy to implement but not officially supported. there is mpeg dash and hls, but not simple to implement without native support in the browser. but we have found a way using the media source extensions api to bring these formats to IE and Chrome desktop editions. But firefox will have to wait until it adds support for MSE. Your statement seems as though you probably think it's a very simple thing, but it is much more complex than you realize.

 

True, it does seem like a simple fix, but i can hear that it ain't. :)

But i look forward to MSE being implemented :)

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