Is there a way to force plex to not transcode an entire movie as soon as i press the play button?
I can for example press the play button and 5 seconds later hit the pause button and plex is still transcoding the entire 2h movie.
Is there a way to tell the server to maybe transcode 10 min of the movie (like a buffer) or similar? Makes no sence to start transcoding the entire 2h movie at start.
it looks to me like it’s only transcoding the audio from DTS to AC3, and for some reason it’s also converting the subtitles from “srt” to “ass” Both conversion are easy work on most servers, and probably only took a couple of minutes at most to get that far along (about half way)
Even if over time, while you are paused, it continues transcoding to the end, the whole movie is converted and ready to play instantly, and the server has resources to do other heavy lifting if it needs to. I kinda think it’s a good thing Plex does that
ASS subs are always making an ASS out of themselves and it’s very odd Plex is taking perfectly fine subs and making an ASS out of them (I hope that’s not a trend).
Here’s PfW Direct Playing an item here on the Desktop and still - the stream pulses to fill a buffer and keep it filled at the player - A stream never plays Directly, but always plays through a buffer at the Player. That’s how things work:
For me, when the transcoding (as image above) starts, my hard drives goes crazy for like 3-4min, the i7 CPU goes at around 20% so the load isnt that much. But for someone that watches like 20-30min at a time, it seems way much waste or resources on the server, since every time i bring up the videos, it starts the entire transcoding from the beginning again.
Well - I just tossed that video into the transcoder and while the blowers were engaged - the granularity of the graph in Plex’s Dashboard doesn’t really show what’s happening. The stream is pulsing along as indicated by the Bandwidth Graph, but the transcoder’s graph is less informative:
As far as I can tell - things are working normally - and transcoding requires horsepower. <----that HEVC to AVC transcode required a LOT of it, relatively speaking…lol
The transcoded files are stored in a temporary folder on your hard drive. If you haven’t stopped the stream, the temporary files should still be there. That is, if resuming from “pause,” transcoding from the beginning shouldn’t start all over.
If you have stopped the stream, the temporary files are deleted, so transcoding has to start over from the beginning, or from wherever position you are in the video if you have chosen to start from
