Has this been implemented yet?
Beyond TV had this feature and it could be automated globally, per-configured recording or manually queued after a recording. You could set it to keep the original or automatically delete it. It was a fantastic feature for those of us that like to keep old recordings and donāt like to keep buying new hard drives.
For movies I wouldnāt let it do the conversion because I wanted the original quality but for most shows I didnāt care about maintaining perfect HD quality so I would let them recompress overnight and it recovered about 2/3rd of the drive space each episode took. If I noticed I was running low on space I could go into my library and set a bunch of older episodes to get compressed and delete the original. Obviously you have to have a level of trust that the new version will be good before you allow automatic deletion of the originals.
Would also like to have this. It doesnāt have to be a default, but simply an option when you choose the transcode settings.
cough another media server has this feature and itās really nice to have.
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Iāve been doing transcoding manually and this feature would hit the spot. I just suggested something similar, but this feature request didnāt show up in my initial search.
There are only 8 votes for this feature. If as many people want it as is suggested by the posts, then more people need to vote for it.
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Thats right its so crazyā¦
Please implement that feature! Would really be great!
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Thank you for reminding me of the recycle bin. I converted 4k videos of the kids school plays to 1080p and thought i could just delete the originals threw plex . It gave me the option to choose which file to delete and it still deleted both of them. I was able to go into the recycle bin and chose to restore the 1080p files which worked. iIs still very annoying that the program will ask which file do you want to delete and still deletes them both.
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Just to expand on this, it would be great if we could automate optimizing our libraries as well. This way when I dump some footage Iāve recorded it would just auto optimize and replace the original version with the optimized one.
Iād love to see this and have it server side that was just the following:
Automatically optimize content to mp4 if possible.
Ie if the file isnāt mp4 but everything in it could be mp4 and still work then do it. This is just a quick container transcode and would really help people using iOS as a small example.
Another option is that the resulting transcoded file keeps the same name as the original within the Plex Versions directory. It would then be up to the admin of the device hosting the media to manually replace files if this is desired.
Hi Guys, So we get this feature or not? Can we give a first page lock for this article? 
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Yes! This feature is necessary! Especially if the server is on a nvidia shield! Handbrake will ne be installed on an nvidia shield.
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Would love to have this. My laptop struggles to keep up with many higher quality transcodes, so i have to pre-transcode some shows before i watch them (annoying when you sit down to watch and then realise it needs to transcode). Optimising everything in one batch, and any new files i add, then deleting the original, would be amazing!
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Would love to see this as it should be down the the owner of the media if they wish to keep 2 versions or only the converted version. Having 2 versions only takes up space in most setups and would be much less risky to have a native built in option to favour the optimized version for over the original version due to the fact you needed to convert it in the first place so why keep the larger unplayable version
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This would be beneficial for things like DVR from a device that sends RAW HD. These are LARGE TS files that would be nicer to have transcoded into something smaller.
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This is something i would happily pay for as part of plexpass. There isnāt much in the current plexpass offer that is worth paying for at the moment
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i found TDARR if anyone need this featureā¦ All my video converted to H265. Reduced 30-40% space and i dont found any quality issue.
I am a long time Plex Pass user and I would love the ability to have a checkmark to delete after optimize. That way people who donāt wanna do it can still keep their original version. This is a painfully slow and tedious amount of work to remove the original go back delete the optimize version and so on. Thank you for your consideration
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Dear Plex team,
I know this is mentioned a lot of times before in the last decade or so, but since it is still not implemented I will address this again. For me this would be a major plus for Plex, mainly due to filesize reduction. I donāt think Iām the only one who is waiting for this for years now.
Would you please add the feature to automatically create an optimized version and automatically delete the original version? This so that only the optimized version remains afterwards.
If implementing this is an budget issue, than please let us know, maybe we can startup something like a crowdfund alike construction to get this implemented.
Please donāt just close this thread because this request is mentioned before. Please communicate why this is not implemented yet and what can be done to implement it.
Best regards,
Martijn
How is this still not a thing. I dont even care that there isnāt a button to do this, I just donāt want plex automatically deleting things because i removed the original file. Iāve lost an entire day of time waiting for transcodes because Plex just decided to delete files i didnāt tell it to.
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