Hi all.
Does anyone know if there is a limit (filesize or other) to what photos plex can stream / display? I have a series of DNG files in my libraries and from time to time it seems Plex will not display some of them. After checking it seems to be isolated to “larger” files, though I haven’t figured out the limit. Is there a way around this? I do not want to create duplicates of my files nor convert them to jpg. I always store my files in RAW so I can later edit them if required.
There is a default limit of 100 MiB, for performance reasons. It is configurable through a hidden advanced setting:
Thanks for the reply. I found my docker application data folder and found the Preferences . XML where I added the parameter to the end of the file. Then I restarted the docker container. The result is still the same.
How large is the file? I don’t believe DNG files are natively supported so PMS is actually transcoding them to jpg. That setting controls what limit a file is before PMS will not transcode the image. It is still possible that the file is too large for PMS to handle.
Some of my files are panorama shots. They contain multiple stitched raw files. I can easily have photos anywhere between 20MB on the low end to 250MB on the high end.
Ok, that might be it. I believe there is also a resolution limit. I don’t know what it is off hand, but I’m guessing your panarama shows are quite wide.
You could say so… 
Any way to work around this? Adding the parameter in the preferences file doesn’t seem to have done anything.
Edit: in my last photo set, I clocked the smallest at 32,8MB and 5467x3674, while the largest comes in at 240MB and 5308x9610.
Edit 2: just for craps and giggles, I decided to export my files to JPG. Same resolution as the originals. All files are under 100MB and all files display, even the larger res files. So resolution doesn’t seem to be at play here. Meaning it probably is a size issue. I’m going to try and find a higher res file that goes over the 100 MB limit and try test it out. I think that somehow Plex is not taking the Preferences.xml file into account for some reason. Not sure if it has something to do with the Docker container. I can see Plex is creating data in the appdata folder / share I have created in unRAID, so I know Plex is writing to and pulling from that path, yet I cannot tell if it is pulling info from the preferences.
I have several .DNG files larger than 100 MB, the largest being around 335 MB. I have had TranscoderPhotoFileSizeLimitMiB=“350” for several years now, and those photos display without issue.
Here’s info on the largest:
My server is running on Linux Mint 20, not in a Docker container.
This is my Preferences content sans some identifying info:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Preferences OldestPreviousVersion="1.19.5.3112-b23ab3896" MachineIdentifier="@@@@@@" ProcessedMachineIdentifier="@@@@@@" AnonymousMachineIdentifier="@@@@@@" MetricsEpoch="1" AcceptedEULA="1" PublishServerOnPlexOnlineKey="1" PlexOnlineToken="@@@@@@" PlexOnlineUsername="MyUsername" PlexOnlineMail="Somename@gmail.com" PlexOnlineHome="1" DlnaEnabled="0" DvrIncrementalEpgLoader="0" CertificateUUID="@@@@@@" CertificateVersion="2" LastAutomaticMappedPort="26157" PubSubServerPing="88" LanguageInCloud="1" HardwareAcceleratedCodecs="1" ManualPortMappingMode="1" TranscoderPhotoFileSizeLimitMiB="512"/>
Does this look right to you?
That looks right. Because the knowledge base recommends this, I suggest not making that value much larger than necessary. If your largest image is 200 MB, 512 might be too much. I might use 220, unless you think you’re likely to exceed that in the near future. If there are performance side-effects of large settings, you’re more likely to run into them the bigger you go. My largest image is 335 MB, so I set the value to “350.” You can always increase it if you exceed it.
Just in case anyone else stumbles upon this thread / issue, I now know what the issue was. When setting up my Docker containers, I tried a couple before I settled on the linuxserverio container. This meant that my appdata folder had a plex subfolder, and inside I had a Library and an Application subfolder. What I dodn’t know at the time is that each folder had been created by a different Docker container and I had 2 preferences files, one in each folder structure. When I finally deleted the unused folder structure and updated the Preferences.xml in the correct one, restarted my container, everything started to work. I can now transcode all my photos without issue.
Thanks for the help and pointing me in the right direction.
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