So I have 5th gen ryzen mini pcs on my tvs right now. Looking at maybe upgrading them because of 4k hevc playback issues.
Looking between 7th gen ryzen or 13th gen intel mini pcs, anyone play with playback on these?
HEVC and or AV1?
Sorry to say, but I doubt this will change much right now. We are still waiting for the next generation to handle 4k streams. 1080p is no problem today though!
Your best bet right now is a gen 8 Ryzen Mini PC. The first Gen 8s are most probably announced in CES, January. No one knows if that will be enough, but it will improve things.
Gen 5 Ryzen to Gen 7 is not really a super big leap, Gen 5 to Gen 8 will be.
Or, you could look into something that supports a discrete GPU and ITX motherboard like the 4 liter Velka 3.
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Am I missing something? My Ryzen systems have no problem playing back 4k HEVC using mpv. Or do you mean real time transcoding to/from HEVC using Plex?
I am using direct play 4k hevc 10bit. It stutters a lot, but if I transcode it. It will play just fine. Maybe a linux issue?
a380 should do a 4k stream?
What if I convert everything to AV1? Would the 11th gen + handle 4k av1?
Sounds like a Plex issue tbh. If you have an Intel Arc A380 you should have no issues playing back 4K HEVC.
Have you tried playing a file from local storage using mpv and seeing if the issue persists?
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I have not ill give that a try. Currently its on my 5700u
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Most of the time is plays h264 10 bit 4k just fine and if i just transcode it off the server it plays just fine as well.
I am using ubuntu 22.04.3 and plex htpc
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Disclaimer: I’m on Jellyfin, not plex
I’ve had good luck with HEVC, using Tdarr to keep all my source media in the same format and container.
I’ve had great experiences downsampling 4k streams to 1080 with an Intel NUC server and quicksync, but I typically only have 2-3 streams max running simultaneously.
As for hardware, I don’t have any specific recommendations, but anything fairly modern should do just fine. 
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I havent had any problems transcoding but I also only have a few tvs in the house. Its only on direct stream i have a problem.
Intel 11 gen + show they will do 8k60 on av1 and same with hevc. I could barrow a 1240p from work and give it a try i guess.
Alright you were right, It was not my computer hardware. I grabbed a AV1 4k and a HEVC 4k put them on my desktop. Played them through VLC both were doing the same thing as in plex. So I checked my CPU AV1 around 20-25% and HEVC around 8%. So I looked a little further, my HDMI is only allowing max 30hz and video playback is 25fps. So I switched my minipc to 25hz and the video smoothed out, both in plex and vlc.
I am not sure why it would make a difference but it seems to.
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Good to know tjough, and nice reporting the findings, for the rest of us to learn!
Nice, Sorry for being lazy, I figured that if a 5xxx Ryzen with integrated circuits was too slow then a 7xxx Ryzen most def. would be too, but an 8xxx could be fine.
Glad to hear it wasn’t the Hardware!
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Sounds like something is broken as my RK3399 can decode at ~1.2x (AV1 @ 4k) in benchmark mode (software decoding). Sure, scaling and audio is also needed but the RK3399 isn’t exactly blazingly fast.
yt-dlp -f 401 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x5lqqji9ww" -o sample.mp4
ffmpeg -benchmark -hide_banner -i sample.mp4 -f null -
ffmpeg -version | grep FFmpeg
RockPro64 (RK3399 @ 1.4Ghz, FreeBSD 14.0):
frame= 4547 fps= 30 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:03:01.84 bitrate=N/A speed= 1.2x
bench: utime=899.952s stime=3.486s rtime=151.702s
bench: maxrss=281472kB
# ffmpeg -version | grep FFmpeg
ffmpeg version 6.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2023 the FFmpeg developers
For reference:
AMD Ryzen 9 7900, FreeBSD 14.0:
frame= 4547 fps=678 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:03:01.84 bitrate=N/A speed=27.1x
bench: utime=152.660s stime=3.116s rtime=6.704s
bench: maxrss=388980kB
# ffmpeg -version | grep FFmpeg
ffmpeg version 6.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2023 the FFmpeg developers
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If we’re just talking playback only, perhaps an Intel N100 mini PC might be appropriate? Supports H264, H265 encode/decode and AV1 decode.
I use mine with LibreELEC and it’s been brilliant. Sips such a small amount of power.
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I have one tried it, it stutters very bad at 4k
Exactly what do you have? I don’t see how a 5000-series wouldn’t handle 4K, what does LibreELEC report if you pretty extended information (I think it’s O (letter) on the keyb) during playback.
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