So I’m thinking about disabling transcoding because it occasionally interferes with my ability to change the color of subtitles.
I don’t really understand a transcoding, what it is, or what it does, and at the moment I don’t really need an in-depth explanation of that, but if the bits and pieces that I’ve picked up are correct, when you play a video in Plex at anything other than the original quality, this requires transcoding, right? Does that mean that if I disable transcoding, I will not be able to play videos back at lower quality than the original file?
If you disable transcoding, you’ll get an error message when attempting to stream a video in a different (non-original) quality. Keep in mind – if a video cannot be streamed as-is, you’ll simply get the same error message and won’t be able to stream the item.
As for what transcoding is/does:
Videos come in all kinds of technical flavors (e.g. file format / container, technical codecs, bitrate, # of audio streams…). Some players cannot deal with certain formats. In that case, the Plex Media Server will “transcode” the file to a supported format.
Another use case for transcoding is users wanting to stream a video in a lower quality (e.g. because they’re on the road and only have a limited bandwidth / restricted data plan).
