It would be nice if you allowed to have optimized versions of music. I understand that transcoding is not very intensive, but it would be nice to have for synced devices. I have a few devices that I want to have lower quality versions of my music on to save space. If I enable synced playlist on 3 devices, my server now has to transcode that playlist 3 times in a row to transfer to each device. Since sync is kinda unstable too, I have had to delete and recreate the sync on my devices every so often. which causes a transcode again. If I could have an optimized version of the playlist it would be able to just quickly sync that version to devices.
Old thread, but for the sake of avoiding duplicates:
Old post
+1 for this. As OP says, encoding music on the fly isn’t resource intensive in of itself, but it has limitations. The big one for me is you can’t skip around a track until it has fully
loaded, which can sometimes take upwards of 10+ seconds depending on the track when on a network with unstable speeds as is often the case with mobile data (at least around where I’m at).
I got around that limitation by replacing my whole lossless library with AAC 256kbit encoded versions (kept the FLACs in an archival folder, dw). This isn’t optimal because it requires additional work to maintain, but also because I’d like to play my lossless files when network bandwidth isn’t a limitation (like over LAN) while falling back on the pre-encoded versions automatically when playing with, say, mobile clients over cellular.
EDIT: Turns out the seeking issue when not fully loaded with OPUS (as mentioned in “Old post”) is related to either OPUS, the OGG container, or Plex itself, not the transcoding process. No clue, but I hope it ends up resolved one day.
Also found out that using Plex Web will transcode back to AAC anyway because, as far as the last post I could find on this subject in 2019 says, browsers don’t report if they have OPUS support and Plex didn’t want to risk it failing to play. It seems a bit silly to still be doing this and holding the whole codec back as really only IE doesn’t support it. Maybe just fallback to AAC/MP3 if the user agent is IE?
Ofc, being able to sync my whole library as opposed to 24h worth on Plexamp would completely bypass this issue, but that’s a different topic.
