Plex sucks on the Apple TV (and likely most other devices) because unless the video fits in a very narrow band of codecs (AVC, maybe HEVC with DD audio) it's going to insist on transcoding the video.
The absolute best setup I've found is Infuse (https://firecore.com/infuse) with Plex as the backend. Infuse will ALWAYS request the raw video/audio stream and does all the decoding on the Apple TV, so your Plex machine can be very modest (it's never transcoding, after all).
You can also forego Plex and just have Infuse index all the content, but I've found that it's nice to have a single Plex backend that can be shared amongst multiple Apple TVs, iPads, etc.
Which codecs do you mean? Guess I'm weird; I have only ever used h264 and now hevc, any others are only ancient lower-than-SD quality files which transcode without any issues. (Many files are .mkv; they still work without a transcode.)
Well DVDs are MPEG2, and some really old Blu-Ray releases are as well. You also see VC-1 in older releases. Probably should have been a little more specific, Plex will insist on transcoding if the client can't handle the codec natively. Generally speaking that means AVC or HEVC (on newer devices) only.
True, thanks. There's AV1, VP9 and related codecs too, but I've not seen many sources that only provide those and not one of the MPEG codecs as well. I've moved towards HEVC for anything I want to hang on to long-term, now that all my devices can handle it.
my apple tv 4 plays natively 1080p h265 with 5.1 audio with infuse 5 pro served by my pentium with 8 gigs of ram plex server over lan. Strangely, i am sure and old version of the plex app did the same. i think its more an issue of the way the videos are muxed and the audio codec.
The absolute best setup I've found is Infuse (https://firecore.com/infuse) with Plex as the backend. Infuse will ALWAYS request the raw video/audio stream and does all the decoding on the Apple TV, so your Plex machine can be very modest (it's never transcoding, after all).
You can also forego Plex and just have Infuse index all the content, but I've found that it's nice to have a single Plex backend that can be shared amongst multiple Apple TVs, iPads, etc.