Force download of codecs

i was just wondering if there was a way to force plex to pre install codecs it might need to play future content. im preparing to depart on a 7 month deployment and i would like to avoid the plex cannot play this item because it cant download a codec. if you have any tips and tricks that might help avoid this issue that info would be great.

the plex setup i have is a thin Mini ITX 16gb ram and a I7 6600k and the data is stored on a Drobo this tandom setup seems to work pretty good i made the mistake of depending on the drobo to play stuff and that didnt work out at all lol

So I feel like they changed this behavior in one of the recent betas because after I upgraded I was watching the logs on my Plex Server (to make sure there were no problems)and saw these messages at startup:

May 12, 2018 19:21:18.373 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'dca' May 12, 2018 19:21:19.622 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'h263' May 12, 2018 19:21:21.521 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'h264' May 12, 2018 19:21:22.893 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'hevc' May 12, 2018 19:21:24.066 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining encoder 'libx264' May 12, 2018 19:21:25.534 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'mp2' May 12, 2018 19:21:26.629 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'mp3' May 12, 2018 19:21:27.771 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'mpeg1video' May 12, 2018 19:21:28.992 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'mpeg2video' May 12, 2018 19:21:30.095 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'mpeg4' May 12, 2018 19:21:31.207 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'msmpeg4' May 12, 2018 19:21:32.366 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'vc1' May 12, 2018 19:21:33.828 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'wmav2' May 12, 2018 19:21:34.825 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'wmv1' May 12, 2018 19:21:36.093 [3560] INFO - CodecManager: obtaining decoder 'wmv2'

This was on PMS version:

May 12, 2018 19:21:11.783 [12248] INFO - Plex Media Server v1.13.0.5023-31d3c0c65 - Microsoft PC x64 - build: windows-i386 english - GMT -06:00

So perhaps they are downloading everything at startup again (this was just a sample of the lines, there were more) or perhaps it looked at the codec I already had on the system and forced an update just for them? Not sure how I could tell if all the codec were there. Anyone done a fresh install of the above version to see if it says the same things?