Trying to understand software encoding/decoding in emby

[jachin99 82]

Hello, because there are quite a few new transcoding options in Emby lately, I thought I might try to understand some of them a little more to see if I could improve Picture quality or video playback for at least live TV.  I direct play on almost everything but I do have live TV setup to include the video buffer so I can time shift.  Looking at the user sessions page, it almost always tells me its using software encoders and decoders.  I have a skylake I5 cpu just for clarity.  Because the only software encoding option is the H264 encoder am I right to assume that changing these options will improve either the quality or performance of direct played videos?  In particular, I want to remove some color banding on movies, and try to fix a few hiccups (Like audio cutting out for a second every minute or so) on certain channels.  I mostly use the shield pro for playback.  Thanks.

[Luke 37151]

@softworkz

This is actually a plugin page from the diagnostics plugin.

[softworkz 3341]

@jachin99 - Do you have an Emby Premiere subscription? It is required to use hw accelerated transcoding.

 

[jachin99 82]

Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation over the weekend.  I do have premier but I think it was using software encoders and decoders because I had the allow video stream copy option checked on in the live TV settings.  Unchecking that box, or forcing deinterlacing for SD content results in kind of jaggies though so I'm curious about how I can clean up the picture. 

Something I have noticed though is that WITHOUT the video stream copy option checked, when I enable zoom to make the picture fit the whole screen, the picture has a weird stretching distortion on the bottom of the screen.   

Edited June 1, 2022 by jachin99