Question VLC Vs Plex for movies

[jdandy1234]

Hello All, Question:

In my house, I have a mixture of PC's hooked to TV's, and Roku's. My family uses & likes Plex, even my distant family likes to watch my plex for its remote capabilities and easy to use menu system. My entire family can really care less about movie image quality. Myself, I am a bit of a videophile. Video quality means alot to me. Granted, if I am just playing a movie for background noise, I use Plex. However, when I am actually watching a movie (paying attention to), I use VLC. It seems like VLC is a much more strait video file player, and doesn't really bother with trans coding (Yes, I know you can turn off trans coding in Plex).

Question..is there any really video quality difference Plex vs VLC...what is your experience ?

Thank you

 

[Viking2121]

Well the majority of my movies are in 1080p, I got a few that are 4k, and they do look good don't the Roku TV's, but the firestick kinda looks terrible, its been that way for a long time, I ended up switching that out with a non 4k Roku and it looks better don't that TV.

I do use the Plex web interface just because I'm always adding things or changing things, so I normally want what I want from the web interface and it looks good, even the movies I in 4k look great on it, way more crisp than 1080p anyway.

Transcoding don't seem to take a massive hit in quality, but I also transcode on the CPU and I have the option enable that says "Make my CPU hurt" and I turn the background transcoding on Vary Slow, I do not have an Nvidia GPU for the encoder, its all done on the CPU, but I also have 32 threads for it to play with and I only have 2 maybe 3 users on it at a single time, 2 are family that's not on my local network, and 1 that is, and me which I vary rarely use Plex unless I'm out, I view on my phone.

Idk if them settings really would help you in your case, and most movies have like a fim grain to it, so its kind of hard to notice on some higher res videos, but Im also a person who can notice 4k and 1080p, but I'm fine with 1080p lol.

Good luck.

 

[jdandy1234]

Well the majority of my movies are in 1080p, I got a few that are 4k, and they do look good don't the Roku TV's, but the firestick kinda looks terrible, its been that way for a long time, I ended up switching that out with a non 4k Roku and it looks better don't that TV.

I do use the Plex web interface just because I'm always adding things or changing things, so I normally want what I want from the web interface and it looks good, even the movies I in 4k look great on it, way more crisp than 1080p anyway.

Transcoding don't seem to take a massive hit in quality, but I also transcode on the CPU and I have the option enable that says "Make my CPU hurt" and I turn the background transcoding on Vary Slow, I do not have an Nvidia GPU for the encoder, its all done on the CPU, but I also have 32 threads for it to play with and I only have 2 maybe 3 users on it at a single time, 2 are family that's not on my local network, and 1 that is, and me which I vary rarely use Plex unless I'm out, I view on my phone.

Idk if them settings really would help you in your case, and most movies have like a fim grain to it, so its kind of hard to notice on some higher res videos, but Im also a person who can notice 4k and 1080p, but I'm fine with 1080p lol.

Good luck.

Thank you so much for your reply !

 

[jdandy1234]

Well the majority of my movies are in 1080p, I got a few that are 4k, and they do look good don't the Roku TV's, but the firestick kinda looks terrible, its been that way for a long time, I ended up switching that out with a non 4k Roku and it looks better don't that TV.

I do use the Plex web interface just because I'm always adding things or changing things, so I normally want what I want from the web interface and it looks good, even the movies I in 4k look great on it, way more crisp than 1080p anyway.

Transcoding don't seem to take a massive hit in quality, but I also transcode on the CPU and I have the option enable that says "Make my CPU hurt" and I turn the background transcoding on Vary Slow, I do not have an Nvidia GPU for the encoder, its all done on the CPU, but I also have 32 threads for it to play with and I only have 2 maybe 3 users on it at a single time, 2 are family that's not on my local network, and 1 that is, and me which I vary rarely use Plex unless I'm out, I view on my phone.

Idk if them settings really would help you in your case, and most movies have like a fim grain to it, so its kind of hard to notice on some higher res videos, but Im also a person who can notice 4k and 1080p, but I'm fine with 1080p lol.

Good luck.

You sound like me. I am always re-arranging things in Plex, and I do have the setting to make the CVPU hurt. Yes, I totally get the 4k looking like sandpaper effect. Very hard to notice if there is a difference between 4K and 1080 especially for older movies shot in 35mm. I just bought the 4K Gold version of Scarface just because it was $20. It was good, but not I was SUPER impressed. Id say about a 10 Percent improvement in image quality over remastered bluray. The HDR was ok. but again, not super impressive. It seems like with HDR, the skintones are more natural, and not so "cartoony" colorful..but that is just my opinion. 1080p non-HDR is just fine for me for most movies. If I want great quality, ill rip the entire blu- ray disk movie to my NAS Raw - uncompressed. I have a directory on my NAS with about 15 movies uncompressed movies that I watch on a regular basis.

 

[Viking2121]

You sound like me. I am always re-arranging things in Plex, and I do have the setting to make the CVPU hurt. Yes, I totally get the 4k looking like sandpaper effect. Very hard to notice if there is a difference between 4K and 1080 especially for older movies shot in 35mm. I just bought the 4K Gold version of Scarface just because it was $20. It was good, but not I was SUPER impressed. Id say about a 10 Percent improvement in image quality over remastered bluray. The HDR was ok. but again, not super impressive. It seems like with HDR, the skintones are more natural, and not so "cartoony" colorful..but that is just my opinion. 1080p non-HDR is just fine for me for most movies. If I want great quality, ill rip the entire blu- ray disk movie to my NAS Raw - uncompressed. I have a directory on my NAS with about 15 movies uncompressed movies that I watch on a regular basis.

Yeah I don't have any TV's that do HDR, and my monitor doesn't so I really have no idea how HDR movies would look like or how they are supposed to really truly look like apart from walking into electronic stores. I did notice some weird compression like on wifi on some computers, but on the TVs it's hard to tell, unless it was the firestick, I just don't get why it was so bad on that thing. But I would expect playing a movie native would have somewhat better quality than having the server transcode it, even if the quality loss is supposed to be minimal I'm sure you could pick it up on some displays.

 

[jdandy1234]

Yeah I don't have any TV's that do HDR, and my monitor doesn't so I really have no idea how HDR movies would look like or how they are supposed to really truly look like apart from walking into electronic stores. I did notice some weird compression like on wifi on some computers, but on the TVs it's hard to tell, unless it was the firestick, I just don't get why it was so bad on that thing. But I would expect playing a movie native would have somewhat better quality than having the server transcode it, even if the quality loss is supposed to be minimal I'm sure you could pick it up on some displays.

To be quite Honest, your not missing much without HDR, I know everyone says its amazing..and granted its good, but not a must have. The only really difference is when Playing Console Games, but even that is subjective to how the HDR was implemented .some games look worse, some better

 

[robert600]

Hello All, Question:

In my house, I have a mixture of PC's hooked to TV's, and Roku's. My family uses & likes Plex, even my distant family likes to watch my plex for its remote capabilities and easy to use menu system. My entire family can really care less about movie image quality. Myself, I am a bit of a videophile. Video quality means alot to me. Granted, if I am just playing a movie for background noise, I use Plex. However, when I am actually watching a movie (paying attention to), I use VLC. It seems like VLC is a much more strait video file player, and doesn't really bother with trans coding (Yes, I know you can turn off trans coding in Plex).

Question..is there any really video quality difference Plex vs VLC...what is your experience ?

Thank you

I can't exactly answer your question since I don't use VLC. But, I do use something very similar (PotPlayer). I've also used Plex. There's no question in my mind the picture quality using PotPlayer is noticeably superior.

To be fair, I've played around with settings in PotPlayer to improve it's default output (I use the MadVR renderer for instance). When I tried Plex ... I pretty much was using the default settings so ... maybe it could be 'tuned up' to match Potplayer ... I just don't know enough about 'tuning Plex up'. I doubt it offers the same user flexibilty as Potplayer but who knows? I think VLC also allows for a lot of custimization.