Server Version#: Version 1.16.5.1552-8e8d0c785 (synology)
Player Version#: 7.28.0.15501 (nvidia shield)
I’ve been experimenting with turning off the “Disable video stream transcoding” option on the Plex Server. Certain videos play fine on my device with this option checked, while others don’t (depending on the codec, of course). What I noticed however, is that, depending on the codec, I don’t actually need to transcode - which makes sense. In these cases, playback is at full resolution, and the CPU usage on my server is much lower (still jumpy, as I suspect it is transcoding the audio track).
I could enable this server option only when watching content that requires transcoding, and then disable it when I get a playback error. However, it seems reasonable that the server had an option to auto-negotiate the transcoding, perhaps a “prefer not to transcode” option. In such a case, I could leave the “Disable Video Transcoding” turned on, and when there was a playback error, it would fall back to transcoding.
Am I missing something? I most certainly NOT an expert on codecs or transcoding… just thinking through the basic logic here. Suggestions welcome.
The server does „negotiate“ the requirement to transcode based on information provided by the client (e.g. max resolution, codecs, bitrates, audio channels, video profile levels… supported by the client). Sometimes this can be off if the client cannot use all features of a platform… e.g. if the platform isn’t exposing all of its capabilities to 3rd party apps such as Plex (there used to be cases where some Smart TVs restricted DTS audio to the vendor‘s own apps). However there’s also been cases where the client profile simply wasn’t up-to-date.
Some users asked to allow disabling the transcoding entirely. This was mostly driven by scenarios where they had shared with users/friends who kept unnecessarily transcoding media by setting a specific video playback quality level in their Plex clients (requiring Plex to transcode) instead of using max/original quality (which allows Plex to play media without transcoding if the platform allows it). To be fair… most clients come without max/original quality as their default quality level for remote/internet streaming…
