When I add an entire library to be optimized…when I go to settings I only see a single entry for each library. So from what I can tell, I can not delete individual movies/shows that were added as part of a library.
@athflying@gmail.com said:
How much content are you “optimizing”?? I am thinking it’s going to take awhile…I have as I said about 2.5 TB. I am going out of town beginning of August, so really hoping it finishes and I have a couple days to work out any kinks.Everything I read here isn’t the most encouraging.
It’s only 300 GB in the first library I m optimizing. However my hardware is any pretty old. Just a Quad Duo Core processor. I am sure if you are using a i5 or greater that your times will be much faster than mine. Other than the speed, things are working well and I am encouraged by how much PMS does automatically.
It converted 33 movies overnight…roughly 12 hours…so it’s moving along pretty well.
It seems to be generating .srt files which I believe are subtitles. These aren’t in the original file so not sure how, why, or where they are coming from. Is there a way to stop from happening?? I never want subtitles.
@athflying@gmail.com said:
When I add an entire library to be optimized…when I go to settings I only see a single entry for each library. So from what I can tell, I can not delete individual movies/shows that were added as part of a library.
You’re correct. I am optimizing at the TV Show(sometimes Season)/Movie level rather than at the library level as I want that ability to fine tune my travel collection over time.
My Usage:
I have found that there are some shows where I can pull up just about any old episode and enjoy it. The same goes for my son and wife too. We have several shows like this and here I optimize at the TV Show level so we have all of them with us all the time.
Then there are the shows where we are watching them each week, maybe skipping a couple and then binge watching to catch up during/after the season. For these I sync all episodes of the most current season (by hand… it’d be nice to have a feature to keep the current/last season as a preset). I have been ignoring the watched status setting on shows for my wife and son or all of us but I do leverage it for shows only I watch.
My current setup is as follows:
**I’ve only set it up today, so I’m not 100% married to it yet.
- Primary PMS running on it’s own Ubuntu VM (i7-3770).
- Primary video files stored on separate physical unRAID server
- I am currently using a custom optimization profile to get 4 Mbps 720p video and stereo audio as I believe Chromecast will not play 5.1 audio (or something like that. haven’t looked too deep into it, but I want to make sure Chromecast and all iOS/rPi devices will direct play my optimized files.)
- Optimized files pointed to a folder on my ZFS VM server which is running Sync (BT Sync)BT Sync. I have a sync configured for both OptimizedTV and OptimizedMovies folders on the ZFS server
- WD My Passport Wireless Pro plugged in to USB 3 port on Windows 10 box running Sync configured so OptimizedTV points to TV on the WD and OptimizedMovies points to Movies.
- PMS on the WD has two libraries defined for TV and Movies folders.
I will use the same custom optimization for movies and likely sync those one at a time. I may look to also sync recently added as well… undecided.
With this configuration I’m able to manage it nearly 100% via my Primary PMS’ Optimization settings. Sync adds/deletes content on my WD drive basically as fast as it can transfer it. When I want to take a trip, my plan is to safely eject the drive from the W10 machine and plug it in to a power outlet overnight to allow PMS to fire up and process everything. I’m not sure yet exactly how long this processing will take. I’ll likely work through it in chunks so the content that stays on the WD all the time is done and it’s only needing to worry about new episodes/movies.
I’m curious how everyone else is managing this for themselves. It would be fantastic if one PMS that I own/claim could send Optimized content to another PMS I own/claim and allow it to be managed similarly to how Cloud Sync’s are done from the Primary PMS.
Just curious why you don’t optimize directly the WD Drive?
@athflying@gmail.com said:
Just curious why you don’t optimize directly the WD Drive?
I had issues on the primary/originating server when I “unplugged” my drive with the optimized files. I only tried it once and it was virtual, not with the WD drive so maybe it was a fluke, but PMS did not appear to like that one folder of the library was no longer there. When I get some spare time I can test this more thoroughly. I just wanted to get something working fast so I switched to sync’ing until I have more time to look at it.
What kind of issues? I haven’t unplugged mine for an extended period of time so just want to know what to look out for.
I attempted to play anything and it froze up. I tried via the web client and then an old PHT, neither of which worked. I then re-mounted my OptimizedTV and OptimizedMovies drives and PMS continued optimizing from where it left off and I was able to immediately begin playing again via web and PHT.
Good to know. Sounds like maybe was trying to play the optimized version and it wasn’t there.
I will test tomorrow on mine and see what happens.
On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 8:40 PM -0400, “BrianAz” forums+d226358-s6025034@plex.tv wrote:
Plex Forums https://forums.plex.tv/
BrianAz answered your question: How to keep “Optimized Versions” in Sync on external HDD?
I attempted to play anything and it froze up. I tried via the web client and then an old PHT, neither of which worked. I then re-mounted my OptimizedTV and OptimizedMovies drives and PMS continued optimizing from where it left off and I was able to immediately begin playing again via web and PHT.
My first library finally finished optimizing but the PMS dashboard says there are 9 files that failed to optimize. I don’t have debugging turned on. Which log file might contain what files were affected? The dashboard doesn’t seem to show that. EDIT I was able to find one entry by scrolling through the files in the Optimized Versions section. However as I optimized an entire library trying to find the failed files in like finding a needle in a haystack. Is there anyway to kick off the optimization process again and have PMS pick up the failed items to retry? Updating the library didn’t seem to do anything.
I had disconnected the drive yesterday after hitting pause and then later the movie it had only partially completed showed as failed. I was able to click on it somwhere and hit retry…sorry but don’t remember the details.
I am to the “R’s” of my movie library. I would guesstimate around 1.25 TB of a 1.5 TB library. After optimizing it hasn’t even hit 300 GB on the passport which is pretty impressive.
@athflying@gmail.com said:
I am to the “R’s” of my movie library. I would guesstimate around 1.25 TB of a 1.5 TB library. After optimizing it hasn’t even hit 300 GB on the passport which is pretty impressive.
Well, when you do the calculations, if optimizing to 4 Mbps/720p, that’s just around 1.8 GB/hr at most. With 300 GB of optimized content, that’s at least 160 hours worth of videos.
Just wanted to post my experience with Optimizing. It worked great on my Movie library (only missed 10 files or so), not too bad on my Kid’s library but was missing over half my TV library. I have no idea as to what makes Plex optimize some files and not others. I eventually gave up and am just using SyncToy to copy to my MyPassport Wireless Pro. Optimize is a great idea in theory but in practice is too flaky to depend on. I love that it will automatically optimize new files as they are loaded as well as deleting optimized versions when the original is deleted. Plex also needs a better way to display the failed files and better error reporting when it does fail.
The optimize feature only converts videos that don’t comply with your designated profile/preset (e.g. tv, mobile). If the video is already compatible, then it’s not gonna convert.
Personally, I don’t use the built-in optimize feature. Either I need to clean up the source and maintain as high a quality as possible ergo processing via AviSynth before feeding to x264 (DVD sources), or the source is good enough that I can safely use much faster, hardware-accelerated QuickSync to convert.
That’s what I thought as well so I tried the keep original file setting. This also failed to optimize as well. Which is why I resorted to SyncToy.
