Dang, after removing my complete premium music section the size of my meta-data directory dropped from 713GB to 669GB saving me only 44GB of space. Was really hoping it would be more than that! Actually I guess it was a bit more than 44GB since I also added some additional movies and TV shows.
I’ll have to play around today to see if I notice any speed differences in library listings and whatnot.
Hey Carlo,
I’ve been trans-coding movies using the powershell process you wrote, but now plex is “trans-coding H264 to H264” on almost all the devices being used. Fire tv stick, Samsung and Vizio televisions. Processor speed varies greatly, from 3% to 68% in most cases. I read somewhere that it might be caused by using level 4.1 instead of 4.0. does this make sense, and what is quality difference between the two?
Thanks,
Rick
Something doesn’t sound right. Thee is probably another reason these are getting transcoded like a server limit or a client setting. But would sound funny that it’s happening on 3 different clients. Any chance you can duplicate this playing something. Wait 30 seconds and then go to SETTINGS/SERVER/HELP and download the zip logs and post them here or via PM to me?
I’ll take a look at them which should tell us why it’s transcoding.
Sure can…give me just a bit
sounds good
I think this is what you requested. Let me know.
Thanks,
Rick
Your logs are telling us the client has Direct Play disabled:
Apr 10, 2017 12:54:26.413 [6932] DEBUG - MDE: The French Connection (1971): Direct Play is disabled
Apr 10, 2017 13:02:09.392 [2728] DEBUG - MDE: The Usual Suspects (1995): Direct Play is disabled
Can you check on that?
Under SETTINGS/WEB/PLAYER direct stream and direct play are checked. Is this where you wanted me to check?
Checked on Vizio tv, recommended level is 4.0. If I change to 4.1 will play, but states there could be playback problems…
This could be interesting. @buckeyesfan if you don’t mind, send me a PM and we can exchange phone numbers. I’d like to talk to you as that would be much faster then in the forum (if you don’t mind).
Carlo
The only real difference between 4.0 and 4.1 is the bitrate difference. 4.0 is 20Mb and 4.1 is 50Mb. Some devices start to have trouble at 35 to 40Mb especially over WIFI but it’s rare to have bitrates that high unless you’re playing blu-ray rips. Obviously WIFI could be lower. Hence the “recommended” 4.0 setting. You should be fine at 4.1 if it’s in your house.
You can change the level used in the scripts INI file but many of your “source” files will need to convert as apposed to remux which will cause a bit of degradation in quality. I would definitely try 4.1 on all devices before dropping this.
Carlo
@buckeyesfan said:
Under SETTINGS/WEB/PLAYER direct stream and direct play are checked. Is this where you wanted me to check?Checked on Vizio tv, recommended level is 4.0. If I change to 4.1 will play, but states there could be playback problems…
That setting, SETTINGS/WEB/PLAYER, is for the web player on plex.tv. The direct play/direct stream setting needs to be turned on on each device… so on your FireTV, your Vizio TV, etc.
That confuses so many people. Everyone who uses plex web has access to “Web” for their own settings.
Almost every admin thinks this is a global setting that affects all users instead of just themselves when they access it.
Instead of “Web” it might be better to say something like “My Web” or something like that. Every " Web" would be better than just “Web”.
It’s unfortunate and something I’m highly opposed to that a client can dictate video settings over the server. This sucks IMHO and goes against “server control”. The server admin should be able to “force” direct play (first) before transcoding or be able to limit bandwidth on a user per user basis.
For me with a large upload pipe I don’t want anyone using transcode if possible. I want everyone to direct stream. For someone else with only a 10Mb upload pipe they will have vastly different needs. The server should be able to configure their server to fit their needs over the client as much as possible.
Plex is slowly getting there with some of the new features but they feel like “add-ons” instead of core stuff.
Just want to say thanks again Carlo for all the help and everything else.
Nice to find people who genuinely want to help those of us not so knowledgeable in these areas.
Pleasure talking to you on the phone and working with you.
You have a pretty firm knowledge of how Plex works and how to work around it as many of us do. 
Just remember to pass your knowledge along to other users down the road as your skill build and you feel confident. You are well on your way!
Carlo
Curious,
Do you guys fight with ever changing audio loudness in your media?
Anyone interested in volume normalization we could add to the conversion scripts?
Anyone know of any scripts that work on mp4 files already so it doesn’t have to be re-invented?
I’ve been playing around with a few things today and I’m liking the results,
Carlo
I’m interested. Currently using XMedia Recode to fix the really annoying items in my library that I come accross.
I’ve got it working in the scripts.
Got some nice little improvements if things seem to keep working well. Due to popular demand I added CRF back as an ini option and I’ve defaulted the video to use Intel QSV which is now giving me really good results and is much faster and it doesn’t conflict with the CRF option now.
I also have audio normalization working but it’s not perfect. It’s not as good as a true two pass (scan and recode) but for our purposes I’m hoping it’s good enough. I’ve got to find some of my bad files to use to test with.
All these settings are ini based and can be changed.
Carlo
volume normalization would be great. Constantly getting variations with media
@cayars said:
I’ve got it working in the scripts.Got some nice little improvements if things seem to keep working well. Due to popular demand I added CRF back as an ini option and I’ve defaulted the video to use Intel QSV which is now giving me really good results and is much faster and it doesn’t conflict with the CRF option now.
I also have audio normalization working but it’s not perfect. It’s not as good as a true two pass (scan and recode) but for our purposes I’m hoping it’s good enough. I’ve got to find some of my bad files to use to test with.
All these settings are ini based and can be changed.
Carlo
That’s awesome. I still didn’t take the time to do this with my files because I figured it would be too time consuming, but if qsv can easily be used and the quality is nice then that’s very interesting.
@buckeyesfan said:
volume normalization would be great. Constantly getting variations with media
Maybe I should have been a bit more clear. What I’m referring to is Dynamic Audio Normalization which may or may not be what you’re thinking I was talking about. The Dynamic Audio Normalizer re-adjusts the gain factor to the input audio. This allows for applying extra gain to the “quiet” sections of the audio while avoiding distortions or clipping the “loud” sections. In other words: The Dynamic Audio Normalizer will “even out” the volume of quiet and loud sections, in the sense that the volume of each section is brought to the same target level. Note, however, that the Dynamic Audio Normalizer achieves this goal without applying “dynamic range compressing”. It will retain 100% of the dynamic range within each section of the audio file.
At present I’m only doing this to the AAC audio track and not the other audio tracks although it could be done to them as well. For now we’ll test this just on the AAC tracks. The reason is that most RIPs with DTS, AC3 etc are using the info off the disk which is usually pretty good but an AAC track (especially 2 channel stereo) has probably been created from multichannel source and “looses” some of the dynamics of the sound in the conversation so this volume normalization will help. It will/can also boost the volume since I use a reference decibel setting but it’s not the same things as just doing something like “make whole track 20% louder”.
So in a nutshell once you’ve adjusted your volume for the AAC audio track you should be able to hear low sounds (talking) and shouldn’t get “blown out” when there are loud sequences in the film. This will be helpful for those types of movies that you have to keep changing the volume while watching.
It’s not a mechanism to adjust the loudness so file A matches file B which matches file C type thing. I have that on the drawing board and can manually do it but it’s more time consuming. You first have to use a tool like ffprobe to walk the audio of the file to “measure” the output in something lilke decibels. Then you can remux the file applying a positive or negative gain to the audio track.
