I am running the Plex server on a dedicated headless i3 PC with Win 10 4gb ram. I would like to do anything I can to improve performance. I saw that slowing the background down from the default should result in better performance. Is this the case? If so why would I not have it on the slowest setting?
Thanks,
Nick
That setting is only for background transcoding for Syncing and Optimizing functions.
It has no impact on everyday media playing or streaming content realtime.
It can (If on fastest) impact your live streaming efficiency if you are syncing or optimizing while watching a title.
Your best bet Is to convert your media to a more Direct Playable format before Plex gets it. You can gain significant increases in performance by not transcoding.
Yeah, yeah, heard it before… Plex is about your media, any format, any client… Which relies on transcoding to accomplish this. Some folks feel that if you are pre-converting you are wasting that feature of Plex. Others feel that it’s the only method to maximize the CPU on your device.
You have an i3, so going to guess it’s not high on passmarks. and if you are transcoding things like VC-1 or using bitmapped subtitles it’s a sure fire thing you are causing your performance issues yourself with that codec or subs. Those all require more CPU power than most other codecs/subs, and are going to cause performance hits, no matter how fast of a CPU you have.
You could set up a simple script such as @cayars conversion script and convert your media into the best Direct Playable file container, video and audio codecs automatically. Check them out here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/931888/#Comment_931888  He’s working on a newer version and we should hear from him when those are ready.
Many thanks for this. It seems that it is worth having the very slow transcoding on for the synching and optimising (of what I’m not sure), presumably it will make good use of cpu downtime as the server is on 24/7.
I have the media in m4v and mp4. Most of the films are about 1gb, which is about as small as I’d feel comfortable with to get a decent quality on a medium size domestic flat screen. About 25% have subtitles included. All have been converted from MKV to M4V in Handbrake (as Plex would not recognize the MKV files for some reason - made with Make MKV - I may yet rue not keeping the MKV files…)
Audio files are in Flac, but I rarely have issues with this as one would expect.
Would I be right in thinking that a decent tablet would be able to manage streaming a file of this size? Otherwise I guess it would be worth doing a preparatory conversion to that format.
Many thanks for the advice.
