If you have a PC made after 2015, your GPU might support x265, but the player isn't using it.

RARBG was famous for two things: high-quality encodes and aggressive x265 compression. Their Season 2 x265 release was a "hybrid" — they used the Blu-ray video but sometimes mixed in audio from the web-dl version for better sync. This hybrid nature sometimes breaks timestamp indexing in older players (like Plex on a Synology NAS). If the file plays fine on your PC but not on your TV via Plex, the issue is likely the MKV container's header compression — a common RARBG quirk.

Fix for RARBG header issues: Download a tool called MKVToolNix. Load the problematic episode, go to the "Output" tab, and set "Additional options" to --engage no_cue_duration --engage no_cue_relative_position. Remux. This takes 2 minutes and fixes 90% of "ni work" problems.

RARBG is gone, but their naming conventions live on. If you cannot get x265 to play, stop fighting it. Search for the x264 version of Game of Thrones Season 2.

When a video file fails to play (black screen, audio only, no codec error), the tool automatically:

  • Fallback playback – plays in a lightweight internal player with software decoding if hardware can’t handle x265.