How to Play 4K HEVC Files with Chromecast Ultra

Chromecast Ultra is a streaming device that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port, and provides fast, reliable performance with minimal buffering and smooth streaming. It allows you to use your iPhone, iPad, Andorid device or laptop to stream from thousands of Cast-enabled apps. You can cast your 4K video to 4K TV using Chromecast Ultra, however, most of the 4K videos are encoded with HEVC codec to save bandwidth. Does Chromecast Ultra really support HEVC? Here is a case from reddit user:

Hopefully this is not old news but I just got my Ultra in the mail and tested some h.265/HEVC encoded videos and it worked beautifully. I was hoping that with 4k, support for HEVC would come too. But it doesn’t work at all…

Alough it has claimed that Chromecast Ultra has support for 4K, HDR and Dolby Vision with expanded codec support (HEVC Main and Main10, VP9 profile 0 and 2). The issue like above is not unique. Chromecast Ultra doesn’t supporting decoding H.265 codec yet. As many users reflect, they can play 4K HEVC video with Chromecast via Plex. To be frank, it will consumes a lot of CPU capacities when Plex transcode 4K HEVC/H.265.

To play 4k H.265 with Chromecast successfully, the other way as well as the best way is to transcode H.265 video to H.264 with H.265 decoder in advance. In this way, you don’t need Plex to help you anymore, and the video playback on Chromecast Ultra will be smooth with saving CPU.

Best 4K HEVC to H.264(AVC) Tool for Chromecast Ultra

4K H.265 decoding is not quite a difficult job and you will find hundreds of softwares that claim to help you solve this problem in this regard, the difficult thing is to get one smart assistant which is most suitable for you. We strongly recommend you Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate for Windows/Mac, which works as H.265 decoder, encoder, converter and player. You can use Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate to convert H.265 to H.264 warpped in , MOV, AVI, WMV, MP4, FLV, MPG, etc container with several mouse clicks, decoding H.265/HEVC video to H.264/AVC for Chromecast Ultra is just a cakewalk. It can compress 4K HEVC video to 1080p HEVC for playbak on Chromecast Ultra without transcoding, furthermore, it also can upscale 1080p H.265/H.264 video to 4k H.264 video for CC Ultra playback. With multi-threading technology and adaptive NVIDIA CUDA hard acceleration technology, Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate can achieve real-time HEVC decoding and AVC encoding on PCs geared with GUP-enabled graphic cards. More features are waiting for your exploration.

Quick Guide to Transcode HEVC to H.264 for Chromecast Ultra

Step 1: Add HEVC video

Launch this H.265 to H.264 Video Converter program on your computer, select "File" button to select the H.265 files you want to import. Or you can drag file directly to this program. It supports batch conversion so you can import multiple files at a time.

Step 2: Choose H.264 as output format

Click "Format" bar, from its drop-down list, navigate to "HD Video", "Common Video", you can select H.264 Video(*.mp4) as the target format.

Step 3: Adjust Setting to Keep 4K resolution

Click "Settings" window on the main interface and pop up the "Profile Settings", here you can adjust the output video codec, resolution, bitrate, frame rate and audio codec, bit rate, sample rate and channels. To keep 4k resolution, change 1920×1080 to 3840×2160.

Step 4: Encode H.265 to H.264 with NVIDIA CUDA acceleration

Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate supports HEVC and AVC encoding NVIDIA GPU accleration, which could speed up 30x times encoding speed, the premise is that your computer is geared with a GPU-enabled graphics card.

Click "Tools" at the top of menu and open the Options windows. Then navigate to Acceleration to enable GPU Encode Acceleration.

Step 5: Start to HEVC to AVC encoding for Ultra

Start HEVC to AVC encoding for Ultra by hitting the "Convert" button on the main interface.

Just wait for a second, when it finish conversion, you can click "Open" and pop up the folder with converted file.