Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639-fb6452ebf
Player Version#: N.A
Today, transcodes folder for direct watching and for downloads is the same.
While it’s generaly not an issue, it becomes one when we want to move transcoding to SHM (RAM). There’s no issue for generic transcoding (liveTV, transcode dplaying to a media player) as there is a buffer, and we can put a smaller SHM drive, it will only reduce the buffer size. But it is an issue with downloads, as the full downloaded media has to be stored onto the transcode folder. With media today often around or more than 100GB, it is in most cases impossible to store on RAM unless you’ve got the bank account of Elon Musk.
There is two possible solutions :
A simple one : add the possibility to select different folders for download and transcodes
A more complicated one : add the ability to split files for downloading so it won’t fill the SHM
What size is your ramdisk? I size mine at the max possible size of my largest videos, which are all under 80 GB, because if transcoding one of those movies it may need to be that big (but usually smaller). So it’s 96GB.
I’ve downloaded videos totaling way more than that, also back when my ramdisk was only 32 GB, and not had issues. Since the device downloading couldn’t keep up with the transcoding on the server (write speed to the microSD storage), the server would wait until the client finished downloading some files and purged them off before downloading more.
I have some files that are more than 130Gb, and no, I haven’t got 130Gb of RAM to spare for plex.
The issue is that it shouldn’t need to keep the whole file on the transcode folder, just as it doesn’t need it when transcoding for playing.
And if that’s not possible, we should have two different forlder for transcodes : transcodes for playing and transcode for downloading.
