Can the Web Player transcode HEVC?

[HStep20]

I was looking at using Unmanic to transcode all of my streams to HEVC in hopes of saving some space, however Im curious if the web player is even capable of transcoding videos. I know that some browsers support HEVC natively now, so it may not be an issue to transcode them, however for browsers that don't support it - Im curious if Ganymede is able to transcode those files into a playable codec at runtime.

It'd be neat if we could download to HEVC, but post-processing them from an exterior app to save space over quality is fine by me too - As long as the videos will actually play in the browser after they are converted.

[Zibbp]

The web player cannot do on the fly transcoding, it simply plays the video file. I do the same thing for my instance. Videos are downloaded and tdarr periodically scans the /vods folder and transcodes all videos to av1 to save on storage space.

Ganymede has a built-in "post process" stage that uses ffmpeg that you could accomplish transcoding with but I recommend using an exterior application such as tdarr or unmanic as with those you can utilize hardware acceleration.

HEVC support in browser is pretty bad, see https://caniuse.com/?search=hevc. If you're able to I would try av1 or vp9 as those are more widely supported and there is a big push to start using av1 everywhere https://caniuse.com/?search=av1. Hardware acceleration is sort of required for any of this as without it's extremely slow. Even re-encoding h264 with nvidia or quicksync will probably yield a reduction in size.