Kodi Community Forum

I've been a long time plex media server user for a long time and I would typically watch things in a browser on my PS4, with my NAS as the server

Recently I've gotten a raspberry pi 2 which I'm thinking of replacing the ps4 with and using xbmc to serve up my media. However, I understand that xbmc does not do any transcoding of its own so certain file formats may not play on the pi2.

My question is if I use plexbmc on the pi, is the server going to transcode every single video I try to watch? Or will xbmc naturally play whatever file formats it can handle, but only get the plex server to transcode videos that xbmc cannot play?

I like that xbmc can play videos without any heavy lifting, and the one thing I want to avoid in all of this is reducing the strain I put on the NAS/plex server from transcoding constantly. So does plexbmc only selectively transcode unplayable videos? Or will it transcode as much as using any other client?

I think most of that is a question for the plex people. With that said, the Pi2 can play almost any file you throw at it with the exception of h265 and 10-bit encodes, so unless you've got a ton of that, Plex might not really be necessary, or you could simply turn off all transcoding.

so how does the pi/xbmc decide what videos it can or cannot play? Is it a codec thing?

I have a bunch of media using different codecs in different containers, so I just want to make sure xbmc can handle everything