Known issue. Search “LG subtitle transcode” and you’ll get 50+ hits.
See this thread:
Oh, thanks for the info. I’ll try Xplay.
I am wondering If the Plex staff read this thread and its 122 replies…
Like everyone here my media server isn’t powerful enough to transcode, but my connection is fast enough to prevent transcoding to be needed, yet it still transcodes everytime, even with all the quality settings set to maximum.
Unless I find a way to disable the transcoder, I will move to Emby.
I don’t see the point of not providing this basic switch off feature.
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As in my other posts, it doesn’t matter how great plex bells and whistles if plex can’t provide a basic feature of direct playing our media. There are so many times plex Media Decision Engine would tell plex to transcode while in reality it’s not needed to transcode.
If you choose to use much older and dumber plex version, you most likely will be able to direct play more of your media. That’s why so many people downgrade or just use plex dlna, because ut bypass all the plex “smart” feature that cause transcoding decision.
Or, more people take workaround that is/should be taken as embarrassing for plex, by abandoning plex player, and instead using VLC, mxplayer, or abandoning plex all together by using infuse, kodi, emby or any other software because that will guarantee direct play to most, if not, all of our media.
But you know the root cause is not whether we should be able to enable or disable transcoding. It’s the inability to admit that there’s some thing wrong in the way they develop and test feature and respond to their paying customer.
Interesting that you should say that. I tried Plex about 18-24 months ago, and found it was hopeless on my D214+ Synology because it refused to DirectPlay to FireTV, Mac Clients, and pretty much everything - and because the CPU is so pour (and H/W transcoding wasn’t supported on Synology back then) transcoding was a total fail. I reluctantly gave up, and moved to use Kodi - which happily DirectPlayed everything. Literally, for nearly 2 years I ran Kodi and didn’t have a single file fail to play using DirectPlay.
I changed my NAS to a 916+ last year, and on a whim in March '18 looked at Plex again. Installed it, and ran for a couple of weeks, with everything playing just fine. “So much better” I thought, particularly when I found out that the version I was running was x86 and didn’t even have hardware transcoding (I didn’t have a Pass either, so when I installed x64 I wasn’t able to enable it). I’ve used it for nearly 6 months now, and everything has played just fine, and I’m not aware of Plex doing any transcoding at all.
So for me, it feels like this issue is a complete non-issue now. I’m not aware of Plex ever transcoding anyway. It would be nice to have the transcoding options be “Normal / Hardware / None” so that people who really want to always force DirectPlay can do - I can’t believe it would be more than a 1-line change in the codebase. But also, if you really don’t want transcoding, use Emby or Kodi. There’s so many options out there, it feels like it’s past the point of complaining now. Given that there’s two main reasons people are likely to pay for Plex - sync and HW transcoding, I can see why the ability to completely disable transcoding might not be high up the list of commercial changes for the platform…
That’s really not true at all. Most people would find that if they set up a collection of 1000 arbitrary files on a network share and pointed Kodi at them, all of the files would play just fine. That was my experience over 18 months of Kodi use (on FireTV, Mac and Android). So it’s a bit disingenuous to suggest that media often won’t DirectPlay, because clearly that’s not the case.
It depends on the client app and the device true capability. I have a little bit more than that, with around 4560 movies and more than 24000 episodes, plex client app for Android has been very far from ideal to say the most polite way.
My household is android based ranging from nvidia-shield tv the most powerful Andros client to android tv boxes, smart tv, tablets and phones. I can tell you that reading the logs, the app crashed easy too often for trivial things such as crashing when app is out of focus, when trying to playback item, when MDE sort of getting confused, etc. There’s so many cases that MDE decided to tell pms to send a trasncoded version of the media either both video and audio transcoded or either of them. But in reality it’s wrong decision. Because first, by bypassing plex ‘smart’ feature such as MDE for example by choosing external media player, or by moving the movie copy file into single entry, suddenly the client can direct play. Plex almost seems to have this stance : let’s make the plex for Android player as picky as possible and let’s throw cryptic messages at end user. For example, error, media player error due to a conversion, error transcoding error, or can’t play the media at certain resolution (just because mde got confused by the media or when it’s anamorphic) , error:network connection too slow to pms, or suddenly the decision to transcode just because of mde can’t read audio or video stream at the time of use trying to play the media. A lot of this stupid cryptic error or mde decision to transcode. But once you bypass this ‘smart’ plex feature then suddenly your device can play the media directly. For example, error : this client can’t play this media at this certain resolution, which then results mde asking pms to transcode the media. You can bypass this by playing the media via plex dlna and you will find that your client can direct play the media just fine. Or other error such as connection too slow, error on media conversion, etc etc. Once you try to choose mxplayer as external player of the plex android app, suddenly you can play all your media just fine.
In my other thread I just reported another stupid bug, if you have copies of media of the same title but maybe with lower bit rate and different audio format, plex seems to ignore user selection and can only play the first entry listed in the database. More on that the plex app is so buggy it doesn’t refresh its UI on playback, it will still show the first entry Metadata and audio detail.
I don’t know whether it’s really mde fault or transcoding engine fault or pms or android client fault or plex faulty way of HLS implementation but bottom line is that plex is basically a media cataloging and media playing software. So plex must provide at least this 2 basic function flawlessly. It’s clear that many of the problems can have work around by choosing external player such as mxplayer or by using plex dlna, or by forcing to direct play, a feature that is available in older version of client app. The ui and the background process have gone through so much changes but I guess the lack of testing and getting logs from users made the developers turn blind to its current reality.
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Not true. I have a case right now where if I manually select direct play the episodes play just fine, but by default Plex tries to transcode - resulting in much worse video quality for no reason. Plus after about three episodes Plex starts complaining there’s not enough CPU (there is only one player… how come?) and I have to log in over SSH and restart the service.
Boy, you really ARE full of yourselves. Not only you believe your product has no bugs, you’re willing to argue with paying customers for LITERALLY YEARS over a simple on/off switch that would have costed you 5 minutes of development.
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How do you manually select direct play? What client?
Selecting external player instead of plex own player in theory the same as forcing it to direct play.
If you use this and use mxplayer plus mxplayer custom codec you should be able to play all kinds of media without transcoding.
However in this style it depends on your client true playback capability which is bound by your client cpu, gpu and supported codec.
Also have to drop Plex because of this. Back to Kodi. Bummer because I did like the Plex Gui, info, trailers etc.
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Yeah… that was really interesting reading, this thread. And it explains exactly why I’m going to ditch Plex – there is no hope that developers are going to listen to our needs.
P.S. For last 20+ years I’m doing application development for living. In conceptually similar environment: users are specialists in their area, but not in software workings. So such type of arguments – flexibility vs simplicity – is most common place for us. And I tell ya what – every single time we developers decided that we know better and rejected some requested feature, we eventually ended up implementing it anyway, only this time having users anxious and angry.
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In most cases, if only the default of 2 Mbps 720p was instead set to Maximum, this thread would have seen a lot fewer replies.
But of course, devs. always know better.
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Apples and Oranges. Kodi is like VLC in that it can play just about any format if it has direct access to the native file. That is NOT STREAMING. Now go stick said device at a friends house when you only have a 5 Mb Comcast upload limit and see how well this works for you.
Or if you don’t have an upload limit try playing back a blue ray rip to your friends house.
There is a reason for Transcoding. If your client doesn’t need it, it won’t be used. What is hard to understand about this?
As has been said a hundred times already. Use clients that support your media. Keep your media is standardized formats and you won’t care about transcoding because it will never be used.
You need to adjust your client settings for your environment. Instead of choosing direct play at the show/movie layer you can set up defaults that always apply so that these same shows/movies would direct play by default.
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All of that is well and good, but you’re entirely missing the point of the thread.
Sure, if I want to stream, over a slower connection (or whatever) then I need to transcode to stream. But I suspect 70% of Plex users, maybe more, watch the majority of their content playing directly across a LAN. I do. I never stream. Ever. If I want to watch something away from home, I sync - and 99% of the time I sync the original, I don’t transcode.
So for this scenario/use-case, Transcoding isn’t just ‘not useful’, it can directly interfere with the usability of Plex. If I set up all my media in a quality that a) I know can stream across my LAN without transcoding and b) can be played by the client player, then I don’t need transcoding. However, Plex used to be really bad at not transcoding - it would literally never DirectPlay at all. If you’re running Plex on a low-powered NAS or some other device without the capability to transcode, then having Plex transcode when it absolutely doesn’t need to is infuriating, because it becomes completely unusable. And don’t disput this - I installed Plex on my 214Play Synology and it did this all the time. 95% of of my media was unwatchable on FireTV or MacOS. However, the exact same media played just fine across the LAN into Kodi. If I’d been able to disable transcoding in Plex and force everything to DirectPlay, I’d have been able to use it immediately (albeit except for that 5% of media which doesn’t play in Kodi either).
Also, you say “you need to adjust your client settings for your environment, and set up defaults that apply so these movies directplay by default” - that’s not possible in any Plex client. I can select ‘original’ until I’m blue in the face, but if Plex thinks it needs to be transcoded, it’ll transcode regardless. This was the problem I had 2 years ago - I literally couldn’t stop Plex transcoding at all, which made the platform completely unusable.
So whilst everything you say is true when it comes to streaming, don’t dismiss the fact that force-disabling transcoding isn’t a valid option. Is certainly is.
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I came to the conclusion that Plex team thinks that
- Browsing a media library nicely is more important than being able to watch a movie
- Being able to watch a movie on a desert island is more important than being able to do so at home
- Users prefer to spend their time to convert a media to a supported format rather than using this time to watch a movie
Certainly the software has some nice features, but the fundamentals are just not in place. The thread is three years old and the obvious is still denied since the blame is put on the users
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I’m not missing the point as I understand how Plex works.
Any time you use Plex regardless of if you are using a client on the same machine as the server YOU ARE STREAMING. The client DOES NOT have direct access to the file system. All information is STREAMED from the Plex Server which is essentially acting like a web server using web server protocols which are FAR DIFFERENT than being able to access the file directly. This CHANGES THINGS. You can’t easily view the file to see what and how many subtitles are in the file, what and how many audio tracks are in the files, weather the file has a MOOV atom (or index) used for RW/FF operations. The client can’s just move down the file 50 MB to quickly FF. Everything MUST be passed as web requests to the server where the server does it’s thing and then sends back proper web return packets.
Clients that must talk “web” work very differently then clients that talk “file based” with way more overhead and far less freedom in what they can do.
I have never found this to be the case. I’ve used nearly every client type available on Plex except Apple products. I’ve got PS4, XBoxes, android devices, phone, tablets, computers, Rokus, streaming stix, Firebox stix, tablets, etc. Having your media in the proper format made for STREAMING (not local access) is the KEY. FULL STOP.
I’ll be the first to say that most clients are optimized for direct play and NEED tinkering to fix this if that is important. Plex sets up clients so they always work (with or without transcoding) and for remote as well as local use. If you only need the client to work locally on your own LAN then you can definitely adjust things. Especially phones/tablets using WIFI!!!
I’m not dismissing the request. I’ve just been stating it’s not likely to happen for all the reasons given. You want/need them to completely re-architect the platform to use local file based access and this product isn’t designed to do that and is meant to always use internet/web protocols which are game changers.
IRONICALLY, Emby has a feature that allows some/certain clients to “direct play” local files similar to Kodi. You have to have a network file system mapped so the client and server see the files using the same drive letter paths. Then if the client has access to said drive path it will direct play the file. While it sounds great it has issues and is more or less being abandoned by most people because it’s better to just keep your files in a streaming format that just works without transcoding.
Hopefully any platform you use will have a nice GUI.
Being able to play the media away from home (desert island) is just as important as playing it in the same room as the server. The Server can handle both functions with the right setup.
Yes, if you use a Web Server to serve up your content (what Plex essentially is) then you will get far better results having your media in a web friendly format. Very Surprising this would be true. 
Plex is certainly not for everyone nor does it claim to be. It’s never going to be a Kodi nor does it want to be.
There is nothing keeping anyone from running both Plex and Kodi in the same environment. Use Kodi if you wish for local LAN playback if that makes you happy and works (without transcoding) and use Plex for convenience when you want to watch something remotely that may need transcoding. You can also use Plex just for DVR purposes as well to feed your Kodi system.
Think outside the box to get an environment that works FOR YOU.
This^^
I personally go against the grain. Im all about HD Audio, 4K, HDR, Remux, MKV, etc…
If my main client direct plays it mission accomplished.
If the people I share with wanna watch on their iPhone etc… who cares, when HW transcoding works so well.
That said if I was gonna get so uptight about my server never transcoding then as @cayars
mentions I would make sure my media was in a far friendlier format.
