Respectfully, but a hard disagree from me and is literally the point of this entire thread: giving power to the server admins, especially if they want to stamp out needless transcoding of their more luddite family and friends.
I applaud the recent changes to default client app settings for quality, and remain hopeful there is pressure to allow admins to dictate what we’re allowing clients to experience.
At a bare minimum, Plex should provide clearer messaging to a client if an admin disables video transcoding, which instructs users to go into their Remote settings and set quality to Original/Max.
The workaround provided already (using Tautulli and a handy stream killer script)
Having said all this, there is some work required on admins’ part to be sure ALL the clients out there are able run DirectPlay/Stream of all of our content if you take video transcoding out of the mix. You have to make sure:
a) all your content is H.264 (265/HEVC will always transcode on a number of clients) and
b) only SRT subs (no ASS/PGS or other image-based subs) are embedded.
Here are the two scripts I created that help me identify and fix the above:
strippgs.txt (rename to strippgs.ps1 and run in PowerShell) scans your configurable media library and automatically converts any MKV that has non-SRT subs to remux (very quick process, usually ~1-2mins per title it finds). It also keeps a record of all the scans, so every time you run the script, it only looks for newly added media.
hevccheck.txt (change to ps1 extension as above) scans all your media to determine which titles are encoded in HEVC/H.265 and/or have HDR. Once you identify these files, your options are to re-encode in H.264 or just download a new non-HEVC copy.
Once everything is setup, the only errors your users will experience is if they attempt to watch any of your media below Original quality, and they will receive a much more hand-holding error message on what they need to do:
Good luck to everyone and thanks for this thread for great ideas over the years(!).
strippgs.txt (3.4 KB)
hevccheck.txt (2.6 KB)
