Hi there. I am new here and I was wondering - is the transcoding “on-demand” (i.e. it will only transcode when you request the media) or does it automatically pre-transcode everything that’s residing on PMS so that when you request it on another device (e.g. an iPad), any and all of the media that’s on the PMS will already be transcoded and ready to be consumed?
My apologies for the stupid question.
Thank you.
By default it will transcode on the fly if your client can’t play back directly. Some transcoding requires more CPU so that can fail sometimes.
You can pre-transcode or optimize to a format your client can support so it’s not done on the fly.
You can pre-transcode or optimize to a format your client can support so it’s not done on the fly.
Is there a resource or documentation/tutorial that I can read somewhere that will explain how I can set it up to do that?
I was trying to find it in all of the various documentation sources, Youtube videos (from others who have a PMS), google, etc. and I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer in regards to this.
Your help in this matter is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Here you go…
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media/
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/features/media-optimizer/
its called optimize so you can optimize a single episode or movie of you can select a show and use the optimize option and select options for the entire show
this is for one episode
(or select the show)
and these are the options for the show
So here is another question in regards to this:
Let’s say that I have QNAP NAS systems that I can install PMS on, but it only has an ARM CPU, so it’s not going to be very fast at optimizing my media files.
Can I install PMS on another faster system (e.g. 16-core Xeon server) and use my server to do the optimization and then just move the optimized files to the PMS server on the QNAP NAS?
Will it automatically pick up the “Plex Versions” folder if I just moved/copied the optimized files over when I look at the PMS server from the NAS?
Again, your help is greatly appreciated, especially for a n00b such as myself.
Well… there’s no dual-server setup approach allowing you to use one PMS for streaming and one for transcoding.
However… You don’t need Plex to optimize your videos…
There’s other apps such as e.g. handbrake that transcode/optimize your video. Handbrake in particular offers a lot of presets for certain devices (e.g. Apple TV, certain Android/iOS models).
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201358273-converting-iso-video-ts-and-other-disk-image-formats/#toc-1
You can then manually add those files to your drive – if you follow the naming convention for multi-version movies, the video will be displayed as a different version of the same movie.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200381043-multi-version-movies/
Oh…so the transcoding doesn’t transcode them to a different file format or something along those lines?
(My frame of reference is coming from the VLC Streaming Helper where it will actually change the file from its original format to a different format that’s used for the VLC Streaming app.)
Does this mean, for example, that if I want to make mkv files playable on an iPad, I can transcode it using really any method so that it becomes a format that an iPad would be able to accept (mp4 or mov) and that’s what I would need? Is that what the transcoding on PMS does, in essence?
Again, your assistance in helping me understand how PMS works is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Yeah find the best format for your client i.e. iPad or whatever and use any program to encode it and just follow the naming format and you will be good.
Is the optimization in Plex multithreaded/multiprocessor/multicore capable? Or does the optimization only use one thread/core per optimization task? (without Plex Pass)
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