Enable Video Preview Thumbnails on Shield TV Pro?

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#:1.25.2.5319

My Plex was working perfectly on Shield TV Pro, but I decided to upgrade to the latest PMS and it broke. There was no option listed to start or stop the server, and nothing I did would fix it, so I rebuilt my server from scratch.

I took the opportunity to convert my USB SSD from adopted storage to external so that I can actually access the files and back them up to a Windows computer.

A few questions:

  1. I’d like to enable video preview thumbnails so I actually know where I’m seeking to in a movie. I’ve got about 850, plus about 80 TV series. I don’t care how long the process takes, but I’m hesitant if enabling this would make Plex unstable or slow. I also want to be able to back up the thumbnails so I never have to do a full rebuild again. Would you recommend enabling this feature? The SSD is a PNY 250GB, and I’m only using it for Plex at the moment.

  2. When I look at the directory properties of folders on my Shield TV, the “Size on disk” shows 10x more than the “Size”. I know the size on disk can’t be accurate because it shows a 1.7 GB directory as taking up 17GB on my 16GB internal storage. What explains why the size on disk is being misreported, and is that a Windows bug, or something about Shield TV that causes it to report incorrectly?

  3. Is there any difference in disk performance between configuring USB storage as adopted storage and external removable? As I understand, all I’m missing is the ability to move most of my apps from internal storage to the USB SSD.

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Update

I’ve created video preview thumbnails for all 4k content, which is only about 50 movies. It looks like I’m averaging 19MB per movie to generate those bif files, which is a lot better than the 20-50MB quoted by Plex. I should be able to get scrub bar images for my entire movie collection with just 17GB of bif files.

Still would like input about questions 2 and 3.

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UPDATE 2:

I enabled video preview thumbnails on my main movie directory. They aren’t created during scheduled maintenance, but instead only when I select the movie and hit “analyze”.

It’s moving along way faster than the 4k movies, but consuming a bit more space per movie. In 14hrs, 591 movies have been processed. That’s about 1.5 minutes per movie, and about 27MB. Not too shabby.

It will take about 19hrs to process all 800 movies, which isn’t too shabby. I really like the performance per watt of the Shield TV. It’s doing all this while consuming about 8 watts. I think standby consumption is about 2 watts. This is way more efficient than leaving a computer on 24/7.

So far happy with this rebuild. Hoping I can back up the metadata so next time I have to rebuild it doesn’t take so long.

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