Hardware video transcode - Shield TV

[ptaylor]

After seeing the love the Shield TV gets in these forums, I got one last week.

Since buying it, one of the capabilities I've found is that with Plex, it can transcode in the hardware. That got me thinking that perhaps SageTV could harness the power of the Shield to perform transcode jobs. I have no idea how Plex accesses this feature, but if an android app could be written to be a transcode server, and SageTV could be modified to submit transcode jobs to the android app, perhaps this would let us transcode at high speed on our set-top boxes...

Interesting idea?

[Jabroni]

Your mixing things up. The Plex Transcoding you mentioned is because you can host a full Plex Server within the same ShieldTV (runs as a system service on the Android Device). Since it has GPU captable of transcoding, when a remote player wants to playback a local video on the ShieldTV, if the remote player a) doesnt have enougth bw or b) it isnt captable of direct playback.

So now since its impossible to have a SageTV server within the ShieldTV (because this Plex Server is baked in on the ShieldTV Rom), its not possible to have that functionality your mentioning. And for local playback, it uses HW acceleration for playback, and regarding if the SageTV Server needs to transcode or not the video, if player understand the format and there is enought bw, it does a direct stream playback (which means no CPU increase on server cuz of transcoding).

Hope I didnt mix you up more with the explanation

[ptaylor]

I figured if Plex can access the transcoding hardware, then other applications probably could as well...

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by ptaylor

I figured if Plex can access the transcoding hardware, then other applications probably could as well...

This could be very possible once some ports the server to Android.