I would be able to provide a way to delete the original movie and keep the optimized version automatically
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just delete it?
Plex’s stance has always been to never modify the files or structure of your media. It was a major departure from this stance to get either the Delete option we now have, or the Optimize Media feature we’ve recently gotten.
What I would like to see with the Optimize Media is the way to mark an Optimize Version as a new “Original” and this is now the version all transcodes or other Optimized Media versions are based on. Then the old “Original” could safely be deleted without deleting the Optimized versions that are on disk under it. (This is how it works now, delete the original and the optimized goes away, too.) This would be a great way to have Plex convert less than optimal streaming formats to streaming formats.
There are a couple of problems with this, though. The quality of these Optimized versions isn’t going to be nearly as good as the original one was, as the settings used for the feature are preset to the RT transcoding, and not configurable for quality, speed, etc. You don’t want to have blocky or chunky parts of your movies and that’s what you are likely to get with the Optimize Media versions.
The second problem is the audio channels. The Optimize Media only makes a single audio channel with AAC stereo audio. So if you have DTS, AC3 or any other multi-channel audio tracks in your media, this won’t be copied over to the Optimized version and you will lose that audio. Die-hard audiophiles of the group would not take kindly to losing their surround sound capability just to make the Optimized Media versions.
Another potential problem comes into play with subtitles, especially with bitmapped versions of subtitles. As I only use SRT’s I can’t really speak to this, but I know it could be a possibility people could be concerned about…
All in all, we’re going to have to wait to see what Plex’s ideas of this feature are. We have already gotten requests for allowing the admin to set the options for the feature. I hope we can also set audio options sometime, too. I might not need AC3 5.1 on my tablet, but I sure like it on my HT.
Like @MikeG6.5 said, I would not delete the original file, because the original ones will always be higher quality. Media Optimizer uses the same settings as PMS does for on-the-fly transcoding, which is very fast and inefficient transcoding (quality wise).
Side note @MikeG6.5, optimizer does not only convert to AAC stereo. Here’s an XML file of something I got optimized with the original quality setting; you’ll notice it keeps 5.1 audio.
I got the same behavior with AC3 files, they stayed AC3 and kept 5.1 audio… on the other hand, playing them back on a PS4 (and chromecast, I believe, not sure if I tested it) resulted in no audio being played… but the XML said it was there.
If the Optimized Media is using AC3 audio on your converted files, it’s doing something I haven’t seen it do. But then again, every file I have in my library has both AAC and AC3, if available. And as of yet, I haven’t had any AC3 getting put into Optimized versions yet.
If these versions aren’t playing your audio, then it’s likely there isn’t anything there to be played, which is what I’ve experienced in the rare instances where AC3 was the only audio available.
The only real way to verify that there is an AC3 channel in your media is to play it outside of Plex, like with the native media player on your PC. If there is audio in it, then you have another issue with your audio playing on clients.
Yeah, well I submitted a sample file and logs, we’ll se what happens with it. Either way, I don’t really need that function right now so I don’t really mind.
I would love this feature, and I think all the above suggested problems could be solved by enabling both types of optimisation. For example, I could decide that for my movies I want to keep an optimised version and the original, but for tv shows I want the optimised version to replace the original (and then for the original to automatically delete)
This would really help my typical use case (plex is on a ReadyNAS that can’t transcode and I watch on a PS4 that seems happy to play anything in media player but is really fussy in the plex app) as at the moment I have something like 200GB of optimised files all at “original quality” and would love to be able to delete the 200GB of original files!
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The objections on the audio formats aren’t really valid, since anyone who specifically wants this feature is likely to be manually copying them over and doing it for the sake of size (since the output is “good enough” for whatever they’re wanting).
Giving the option to store “Replace original files” with an extra bold and red (well, “IMPORTANT”) type confirmation checkbox underneath saying something like “This will delete your original files and the optimised version may not contain all the information in the original version”.
I’ve got some 17TB of data that I’m slowly getting through on a QNAP (estimating savings of around 2TB when all done), manually running jobs is a pain, and this takes a log of the effort out of it - but I’d like to just turn it on for that entire section and know that any new files that I add will automatically get converted into the output resolution etc that I want will make life a lot easier - plus will mean that it won’t get thta long pause when trying to play something on a device that needs it re-encoded (low power CPU, don’t care about long encodes, but would rather they were pre-encoded).
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Bump…
Has there been any outcome on this? I have just lost entire series of content (9 seasons of 2 shows) to this silly feature… You would think once plex has optimised it, it just spits out the right encoded file for you to do what ever you like with… instead if you delete the original it deletes the freshly encoded file…
Even after a remove from Plex Versions folder, Rename and replace. it then deletes the newly optimised stuff… why would I want two copies of the same file?
Please fix this!
Or alternatively if you dont want us to keep encoded files, give us native load balancing so we can run multiple machines to do 1 job!
Bump…
I have another use case for this feature request. I currently share my libraries with a number of friends. I originally ran into issues with upstream bandwidth serving from my house but have recently solved that by using a server hosted by Bytesized Hosting (highly recommend so far). This gives my friends plenty of bandwidth without affecting my personal internet, but has the downside of limiting storage space/amount of content I can share. I’m currently using Bytesized’s entry level “AppBox +Stream 1” option which gives 1TB of space. My local setup has 12TB available, so I’m just cherry picking the most popular movies/shows to share up on this newly hosted system.
The new problem with the hosted system is the CPU usage involved in transcoding these streams. To combat this I’ve used the Optimized Versions feature in Plex (which is great) to optimize all movies that I add to 720p and have had all my friends set their clients (Rokus/Apple TV’s) to default to “Original” quality. This results in direct streaming/playing most content alleviating the CPU issues involved with transcoding. The downside now is after optimizing I have roughly doubled the hard drive space I need to use to accomplish this, which is a limiting factor in this hosted environment.
I’d love to be able to tell Plex to optimize the version on import and then delete the original. This would be the best of both worlds…giving my friends a high quality streaming option not limited by bandwidth for multiple steamers and allowing me to maximize the space on the hosted machine.
Yes please. Especially considering the DVR originals will be bloated in size and the the optimized version will be much smaller.
Would be perfect for optimizing the whole collection without wasting space.
If I’m not mistaken, if you delete the optimized version plex will delete the original and vice-versa.
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@ucjb I put a but report in about that early last year, I think it got fixed (but not entirely sure and I don’t want to risk testing again lol)
I would like to see this feature as well…
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Would be really great to see this feature implemented.
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I have several shows that I know are safe to overwrite, and this would save a lot of time going back in and manually replacing them.
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Any news here?
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Would like this too.
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How about a simple “Are you sure?” check BEFORE deleting the optimized versions when moving or deleting the original?
I have been manually moving the optimized versions to new sub-directories and then deleting the originals, but every once in a while I forget and bam, there goes 40 optimized movies, so it’s back to compressing for the next few days… At least on a Windows server you would have a recycle bin, in Linux I have not found one…
