www.makemkv.com

Hello!
I just got my Synology DS918+ and filled it with 4 - 4TB WD RED PRO HDD'S.

I am using this wonderful program MakeMKV. I was wondering if anyone had a good idea of the best settings for making movies Direct Play in Plex? So far all of my movies are in Original Quality MKV containers. The devices that will be accessing the movies are 2 smart phones, 2 Fire Sticks, and for the 4K HDR 10 bit, my Samsung Q6FN with the Tezin CPU. Does anyone know what will direct play and what wont for each device? Should I convert them to H.264? H.265? I'm a little new on the subject, any info would be much appreciated.

Actually, if you have the Plex client on each device, the server is supposed to adjust to the client's capabilities. Of course, you will run into the limit of how much processor power the Synology has, if you're running Plex directly on it, when you enable transcoding.

You may want to consider using something like handbrake to pre-compress versions of the movies for the less-capable devices.

Yes thank you. That's what I was wondering is what do I do with handbrake? Anyone have a great setting for 1080p? I have read that handbrake doesnt yet work with 4k 10bit HDR. So if H.264 is the best I'll do that. But I would really like to be able to direct play most of this stuff if possible. I am currently compressing a movie in handbrake from MKV to MP4 H.264
The settings in handbrake are a little in depth, I'm trying to get a better understanding. Thanks for your help!

Handbrake has a number of presets geared towards different devices. Any of them that have "1080" in their name should be fine, but you are right that none currently support HDR10.

I don't think Plex does HDR10 yet, as far as transcoding to different sizes, which is why you probably want to keep the "raw" MKV files on the server for now, along with the ones encoded for "lesser" devices.

h.264 has higher compatibility and usually does better quality than h.265 at 1080p and lower resolutions. Above that (as used in UHD) is where h.265 starts to take off on quality-for-bit-rate, from what I'm told, so the raw files are already "pretty good". My system doesn't have any hardware-assisted h.265 decoders, though, so h.264 works out for me at all resolutions.

It's all about the capability of the client. The server could care less. Case in point there's nothing that won't play on my shield. It doesn't need any transcoding. Most Plex clients are looking for h264 in an mp4 container. It can handle mkv but it has to demux the streams for a lot of clients. Subtitles present another challenge to certain clients. In any case you really want to look up the specs of the client you're using to see what it supports and set handbrake to match. That'll give you the best results.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

There are three solutions here:
1. Figure out if there's a single set of codecs all your clients can play.
2. Have multiple video/audio codecs in your containers, to suit all your clients.
3. Have a server which is powerfull enough to transcode on the fly for multiple clients.