Hi all,
I am hosting a Plex server in “the cloud” - and using Amazon Cloud Drive to provision the storage (mounted via acd_cli).
It’s working really well aside from when I get a lot of Direct Stream / Direct Play clients - then it all struggles a little.
The reason behind this is simple - when DS/DP there is no buffer from ACD to the Plex Server itself - so if there are any surges on the download utilisation on the server this causes buffering/stuttering on the client.
However when it is transcoding the transcoder will get “ahead of itself” and pre-transcode an amount of the media locally before sending it to the client. This allows for a more fluid download utilisation, as it will grab from ACD in bursts (typically keeping a good 15-20% ahead of where the user is up to).
I am aware I can ask my users to change to Transcode on their clients, but only half of them are competent enough to do it and the other half are too remote for me to do.
So to my question - is there anything I can do on the server to Force all streams to transcode? Aware that there is a higher CPU requirement, but the CPU I am using has more than enough poke (I believe it can transcode around 10 1080p streams at once, and most my media is 720p) so I am more concerned about keeping the 100mbit downlink properly utilised.
Cheers!
