Yesterday I was watching a 4K movie (John Wick 2 to be precise) on my LG WebOS TV. Throughout the whole movie I had like 10 moments of buffering for about 5 seconds.
While the video was direct-playing, the sound (DTS-HD MA 7.1) had to be transcoded.
I’m running Plex Server on a Windows 10 machine with a 120 GB SSD which is filled to roughly 45 GB. After having finished watching the movie I looked at my monitoring logs and saw that the SSD had filled up to over 90% while watching the movie, somewhere around 110 GB! Directly after having finished watching, it went back to 45 GB.
So somehow, only by transcoding the audio stream, the SSD seems to have been filled up with over 60GB of transcoding files.
I’ve never experienced this with any other movie I’ve watched via Plex.
Are there any specific files or logs I can provide to examine this behaviour?
That’s expected then. Even when only the audio is transcoded, Plex will take the video stream as well and will “mux” it with the transcoded audio into small chunks of data. Those get stored in the Transcode subfolder inside the Plex data folder.
From there, they will get sent to the client as playback is progressing.
Only Direct Play’ed video files will be routed directly to the clients.
But your file was not direct played.
You can set a different location for the Transcode subfolder, under
Settings - Server - Transcoder - ‘Show Advanced’
However, you better don’t pick a network file share here.
For this reason my transcode folder is pointed to /dev/shm which is a RAM partition on my server, you can probably do something similar for your Windows box providing you have ample memory
Unfortunately, the free utility pointed out in the Serverbuilds.net forum won’t work for drives over 4gb in size. Microsoft made a change in 1809 which breaks that functionality in the free version. Version 4.0.8 fixes this issue, but now you need to pay for the software.
|2018-10-04|4.0.8|* Fixed creating disks over 4GB on Windows 10 RS5 (v1809) that was broken with Microsoft update.
Added official Windows Server 2019 support.|
I found alternate software, and just created a RAM drive of 8gb. Testing it now to see how well it performs.
It works, but 8GB is woefully inadequate in size. sigh
With having two DVR tuners, multiple remote streamers, the chances for an out of space event are significant.
Plex would need to significantly change the way that transcode segments are created / stored / disposed of for this option to be of significant value. Right now, it just isn’t practical unless you’ve got huge swaths of unused RAM. 24GB at least for my small scenario. Far larger in other use cases.
