Technology

What defaults are you talking about? If you meant to reply to my other comment, I'm talking about hardware transcoding codec support settings on the server, it has nothing to do with what codec is chosen for a client - that decision is made separately. Once the codec the client needs is chosen, the hardware transcoding setting only changes whether they codec is decoded using CPU or GPU/quicksync by the server - it has no effect on codec selection. The only reason you would disable hardware transcoding for a codec that your server is capable of hardware transcoding is if your hardware is faulty or produces undesirable output for that codec when using hardware transcoding - most people don't do this, it's a fairly uncommon edge case. And disabling it won't stop clients from accessing that codec, it just means that your server will CPU transcode it if requested instead of using hardware acceleration - so again it has nothing to do with client support or TVs because all it does is switch your server between hardware and software encoding / decoding. The only sane default for that setting is to hardware accelerate codecs that your PC is capable of hardware accelerating if hardware acceleration is enabled. There's no reason not to automatically detect hardware capabilities like Plex does, instead of the current "default" where you enable hardware transcoding and then have to figure out what your hardware supports to be hardware accelerated.

Like even if they copy pasted the quicksync codec support table from Wikipedia into the server hardware acceleration settings that would be miles better because then you wouldn't have to look up that information separately. Or, hear me out, just show next to each option which ones your computer is capable of hardware decoding vs CPU decoding.