live transcoding to HEVC

[MagicDoubleM 121]

At this point of my testing, i'm not sure anymore if i didn't get things right. Is live-transcoding to HEVC (especially 10bit) actually supported or is it hard-coded to 8bit-AVC?

I've test multiple versions and clients (of which all of them support HEVC/HDR via direct stream), but as soon as i lower the bitrate to trigger transcoding, i'll never get HEVC.
I'm running a system with a RTX2060, which has the right HW-encoder, i've also tried it without HW-encoders enabled, but there is never more than 8bit AVC coming from emby, without HDR>SDR conversation sadly.

I'd love to have the option to use HEVC (and also 10bit) as target for live-transcodes, ideally independently from resolution/bitrate, i seriously need more control over those profiles here.

[vdatanet 1618]

At this time, It transcoding is required video is encoded using H264

 

 

[MagicDoubleM 121]

Thanks for the clarification, at least i can stop hunting problems on my end.

[Ronstang 294]

Personally I don't understand the desire to transcode into H.265 to save on bandwidth because the extra CPU and GPU horsepower needed will hurt performance on the the server end which will affect playback even if the bandwidth to transfer is less. Now this may not be the case for your system but all my playback issues I used to experience during transcoding were not due to the limitations of my network and connection but the resources available on the server machine doing all the work.

If you want all H.265 content to save on bandwidth why don't you just convert all your current content to H.265?  I tested this on a file I still had the source to and trancoding my H.264 into H.265 or encoding my source to H.265 resulted in files I could not conceive any quality difference if you are worried about degrading quality.  There are plenty of tools to do this with such as FFmpeg Batch AV Converter which can be customized to your needs and run as many parallel encodings as your GPU/CPU will support.

[MagicDoubleM 121]

Performance-hit on my server doesn't matter to me, the gpu can do hevc/10bit in real-time and that's all I need to know.

Bandwidth on the other hand is a bottleneck in some scenarios for me. I'd need to prep extra versions for those and hold them on my server, wasting storage. Plus, these scenarios are variable, not entirely fixed all the time. Now, all those versions could be done on demand via a modern gpu. Isn't that that the purpose of real-time transcoding, the flexibility?

NVEnc in it's latest version is pretty efficient and feature packed, so if it's hevc is even just only a bit better than avc, then it's already worth it. 

It could also handle HDR transcoding, which is currently not a usable thing with emby. HDR is directstream or washed out colors, but it's also the best version to put on storage.

In the end, what I'd like to see is more flexibility and control over transcoding options. Starts with making things like target resolution independently from bitrate and ends with letting me choose between codecs, bit-depth and how HDR should be handled. Maybe even bring in some fancy real-time filters for upscaling, frame interpolation and what not, because again, impact on cpu/gpu isn't my concern. 

 

[Carlo 4561]

I've love to have this as well since most of the newer GPUs can easily do this for many streams real-time.

The advantage of using h.265 over h.264 is bandwidth.  For the same quality transcode the h.265 would typically need less bits.  For those people on ISPs such as Comcast/Xfinity where you only get 10 to 15 Mbit upload this would allow you to still be able to support a few remote clients. Likey 1 or 2 more remote sessions could be squeaked out of that pipe.