I am trying to figure out which would yield the best results in terms of remote streaming quality:
- Raw, remuxed Bluray (>20-30gb), transcoded via. Plex to match 8mbps remote settings OR
- Encoded Bluray, with the most optimal settings direct played to match 8mbps remote settings
If the quality is essentially the same, I would be more than content to store most of my blurays raw to save the time on encodes and to play untouched when I am streaming locally.
If anyone could provide some input with their own experiences, that would be much appreciated!
The latter.
When you manually encode a movie (e.g. in Handbrake) you can tweak the parameters to exactly suit the source material. By setting the ‘speed’ of the encoding to ‘slower’ or ‘slowest’, there is additional effort made to use the most effective and highest quality encoding strategy.
Plex usually uses the ‘fastest’ encoding strategy. It has to finish the transcode in realtime, other wise the client experiences stuttering.
So, yes preparing a lower bitrate version yourself and only offer this to remote clients is the better strategy.
This also helps when the server has to reduce the quality further downwards. For instance when a remote client has a very weak internet connection.
It is easier (in terms of CPU load) to transcode a source datastream of 8mbps than a source datastream of 35mbps (like on BluRay).
Thanks! Is there any documentation regarding the ‘fastest’ encode option? How is this affected by ‘Make my CPU hurt’, ‘Prefer faster encoding’ and ‘Prefer higher quality encoding’
@tommehnet said:
Thanks! Is there any documentation regarding the ‘fastest’ encode option? How is this affected by ‘Make my CPU hurt’, ‘Prefer faster encoding’ and ‘Prefer higher quality encoding’
I don’t know the exact details, but this setting has indeed some effect on the real-time transcoding. But it is not comparable to the effect of a ‘slow’, non-real time transcoding. The latter wins always, quality-wise.
