As it was recently explained to me on another thread, Plex does not consider the overall average bitrate of a file when it decides whether it has to transcode or not. Instead, it calculates the required bandwidth by factoring the peak bitrate at any point within the movie with the buffer size to determine whether it has to transcode or not. The required bandwidth is recorded in the XML metadata associated with a given file, under the “requiredBandwidth” tag.
After some advice here and a little research, I decided to re-encode some of the ‘worst offender’ movie files, setting a maximum allowable bitrate.
The problem is that my Plex Media Server is not recalculating the “requiredBandwidth” field for the replaced movie files. Therefore Plex is still transcoding them even though they should easily meet the requirements for Direct Play. How can I make Plex recalculate the required bandwidth? So far I have tried all of the following, with no success:
“Scan Library Files” command
“Refresh Metadata” command
“Analyze” command
Unmatch the file, then rematch
None of these steps has worked. The newly encoded files show the exact same “requiredBandwidth” value in the XML as the old files.
The requiredBandwidth is calculated during Deep Analysis, which runs during the server maintenance window.
In Settings -> Server -> Scheduled Tasks, check the box for Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance. I’m not sure how long all the scheduled tasks take. It will depend on the size of your libraries. Suggest you pick a wide window for the start/stop times, at least to begin with (I run Plex on a NAS, which is on 7x24. I’ve never tried to time how long maintenance tasks take).
If the analysis does not run during your maintenance window, you can Plex Dance the movie. This removes all traces of the movie from your system, so Plex considers it a new movie when you add it back. It will then analyze the movie just like it would for any other new addition to your system. FYI, you will lose played/unplayed status, play counts, etc if you do this.
Thank you for your thorough and informative reply. Since posting my question, I was able to work out the Plex Dance procedure on my own. But that’s a less preferable option to using the command line or just waiting for the deep analysis task to run during the server maintenance window.
Both of my Plex servers run on reasonably high performing hardware, so hopefully all the tasks will complete in the six hour window I have configured.
