Play 4K H.265 on Xbox One X

Play 4K H.265 on Xbox One X

The new Xbox One X offers immersive 4K experience, you can not only enjoy 4K Ultra Blu-ray and 4K video streaming but also stream and record clips in 4K resolution at 60fps. For those people who have some local 4K H.265 video downloaded from online sites or shot with 4K camera such as GoPro Hero 6, Samsung NX1/NX500, DJI Phantom 4 Pro/Inspire 2, etc, you may wonder is it possible to stream the 4K H.265 video to Xbox One X via USB or Plex Media Server. The following article will discuss this issue with great details.

Can Xbox One X handle 4K H.265 video?

The new Xbox One X boasts improved video decoding compared to the older Xbox One consoles, it now supports 4K 60Hz HEVC (H.265).

Is it possible to play and stream 4K H.265 to Xbox One X from USB via Plex?

Although Xbox One X own offers native playback support for 4K H.265 format, however, playing 4K H.265 on Xbox One X is still unavailable, you can only use the 4K H.265/HEVC standard for streaming video and UHD Blu-rays. As for streaming 4K H.265 to Xbox One X via Plex, the good news is that you can now direct play 4K content that meets the following criteria on Xbox One X with the Plex app.
– Resolution: 4096×2160 or smaller
– Video Encoding: H.265 (HEVC; both 8-bit and 10-bit) and mpeg4
– The content is being Direct Played
– No subtitles are enabled

Related article: Play 4K H.265 on Xbox One | Play 4K Video on Xbox One S | Play MP4 on Xbox One S 

From this information, we can see that you can now direct stream 4K H.265 to Xbox One X via Plex without any transcoding. But if you try to stream 4K video encoded with other codec such as H.264, it won’t be played at 4K and will instead be transcoded down to a maximum of 1080p.

Transcode unsupported 4K for Xbox One X playing via Plex

Although the Plex Media Server will try to perform the transcoding process for you, however, it is well known that 4K video transcoding is very CPU-intensive process. If your computer’s CPU is not powerful enough to keep up with transcoding your media, you will notice pausing or buffering as the Plex app waits for the server to catch up.

To fix this issue, you can turn to our best 4K Video Converter – Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate. The program has full importing support for all 4K video wrapped with different container file formats such as AVI, WMV, MP4, MOV, MKV, MXF, TS, XAVC/XAVC S and compression codec like H.264, H.265, Prores, etc. Thanks to its batch conversion mode, you can input multiple 4K video into the application at one time for conversion.

With the program, you can easily transcode unsupported 4K video to Xbox One X plex app native compatible 4K H.265 file formats with perfect quality and super fast encoding speed. The program supports hard-ware encoding acceleration, you can get up to 30x faster H.265 codec encoding speed as long as you run your computer on Maxwell (GM206) or Pascal based Graphic cards that supports Nvidia NVENC technology.

For Mac users, you can switch to download Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac to perform the same conversion on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks, etc.

Step by Step to Transcode Unsupported 4K Video for Xbox One X Streaming via Plex

Step 1: Load unsupported 4K files.

Download the free trial version of the program. Launch it on your computer. Click “File” menu and select “Add Video/Audio” or click the “Add Video” button on the top tool bar to import unsupported 4K video files into the program.

Step 2: Define the output format.

Clicking the Format bar, from its drop-down list, select Xbox One X Plex app compatible 4K H.265 file formats by following “H.265 Video(*.mp4)” under “Common Video” main category.

Step 3: Enable GPU Encode Acceleration.

Click “Tools” > “Options”, in the opened “Options” window, click “Acceleration” menu, then check “Enable GPU Encode Acceleration” otpion so that the program will accelerate converion speed when encoding video to H.265/HEVC codec.

Step 4: Start 4K video to Xbox One X Plex app conversion process.

Clicking the Convert button on main interface to pop out a Conversion window with conversion information such as Time elapsed, Time left, Generated size, and Estimated size.

After the conversion, you can click “Open output folder” to popup output directory with the converted files. Then feel free to add converted files to Plex for streaming to Xbox One X smoothly.