Want this so badly.
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Pleas add this! pre-roll’s are cool, but pointless if you have pregnant pause afterwords.
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I want this more than almost any other feature it would just give the watching experience a more “professional” feel having as few buffering points as possible. This would get even closer to the “Personal Netflix” feel I brag about to all my friends.
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I’d love to see this implemented as well, pre-buffering when preroll plays. This will give preroll a clever use
Has anyone heard anything from the Devs about if this is something they will try to implement? I’ve seen posts as old as 2018 talking about this but can’t find any real answer if we will ever get this?
Please for the love of God give us this Feature!!! 2020 has been a pretty ■■■■ year andthis would be a great Christmas gift to all of us 
why do we treat prerolls like videos. it shows me useless preroll title and ability to fast forward and backward. preroll is just a lazy programming trick to add it to a playlist instead of baking it properly for a seamless transition.
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If that isn’t a rhetorical question, I think the answer is: because it’s hard to perform on-the-fly stream concatenation, AND transcoding (or not), AND support audio stream switching, AND support subtitle stream switching, AND support reliable seeking.
Obviously I dislike the “second” buffering today, but I prefer a few aspects of the Plex behavior. With the current behavior, the displayed media duration is accurate, and seek-to-start doesn’t repeat the preroll.
You could always render preroll into your video today. It’s much easier to do offline and in batches than in realtime.
This is a copy of
Not even 24 days old, but eh, looking can be hard.
On topic though, I still support this.
Just wanted to chime in and say that if there is an issue with them sending that info to the client while playing the preroll, could we at least get a compromise where server-side transcoding is done? Basically, no gain on direct play but if it requires a transcode have the first chunk done and ready to go in the temp directory on the server machine. At least it would be doing SOMETHING.
this is, of course, only if they can’t do it as suggested - which would be massively superior.
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How is this not a feature yet?
Sometimes ‘quality of life’ features are worth it, for their own sake.
I wish it was, but maybe they’re worried about making new issues?
this is indeed something that i’m missing atm. its especially frustrasting as to why the viewer “has to buffer twice” in short succession. the time of a regular preroll 10-15secs would be perfect to do some kind of pre-buffering
As @DeBoet pointed out, this feature request aims to do the same thing as this feature request, which also has the same problem:
As far as I understand the issue with pre-buffering the main file is a client’s ability to handle two streams at once, which might not be a problem on most iOS/android/windows devices, but is on smart-TVs, which often call it PiP (picture in picture). Though I don’t know why a smart-tv wouldn’t support PiP if it already supports DVR 
Reflecting on that, this might not be as big of a problem I thought it would be, thinking about appleTV (which I don’t know much about but can imagine supporting PiP) and other external players to hookup to a tv/beamer.
This then would be a case-by-case situation support thing, which would prompt a “is it worth implementing for part of our customer base?” question.
Hence, I’d rather opt for a “mask buffering” option, which I know wouldn’t change the wait-time between preroll and movie, but at least make the experience more enjoyable.
I mean, even big cinema has time for dramatic pauses before the movie actually starts. Could be an opportunity for home-automation ppl to implement “dim-lights when preroll done” 
imo, the mask-buffering option is easier to implement and is easily supported across the board. so, I ask you to take a moment and maybe put a vote in on the other request as well, for chances it being implemented are higher than this request.
I voted for both requests.
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I used prerolls a few years ago but stopped because of the transition. It felt disconnected, the way you’d see a scrubber as if it were a regular video. I think the scrubber should be hidden entirely during the preroll as a start and then more advanced handling of the movie buffer can be added on later.
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You got my vote. Love to see this feature. Got about 40 pre-roll on an ssd on my server in mp4, playing 1 random before each movie. It’s quite disappointing that you have to wait during the buffer transition from the preroll to the main movie.
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40 prerolls, damn, impressive
I only got some preroll PSAs
+1 from me, this would be super useful
Another +1 I would actually use this a ton if implemented
Would love to see this added, would improve my users experience
