I guess my point is this: Not everyone has Plex running on Ubuntu, Windows or a Mac. I would guess that those 3 platforms might represent about half of those using Plex based on the comments in these forums. The rest of us are running it on little NAS devices.
When I started converting everything I had on disk over to electronic I fell in love with the MKV format. I could put the movie, subtitles, extras, etc. all in the file and could still use it. This was GREAT! Problems arose when I got my NAS. The box decided that everything I had needed to be transcoded, regardless of how the video was formatted in the container, the container itself caused the transcode.
Those odds and ends I had in avi, mov, mpg, etc. also needed transcoding. The only container/format that didn't, based on my clients was MP4, H264 with AAC audio. At the point I found this out, that was less than 10% of my collection was in this format, so in order to watch the shows/movies, I needed to convert them or deal with the stutter introduced with transcoding lags.
Now, several months later, and having moved files around, converted them and moved them back, I find I'm sitting with about 80% of my collection in a transcode free state. Lag and stuttering is now only an issue if I have poor connection speeds or issues with too many people on the network. Most of the conversions I've done have been after hours. I copy the files to my PC, finish up the tasks for the day, start the remux job and go to sleep and hope they are all done when I wake up.
If I could have scheduled my NAS to do this using Plex, it would have saved me a ton of work and effort. Key up a few that needed to be converted, and when the NAS isn't busy it grinds them out. Then I could delete the old format and everything would be GTG for streaming.
I'm not asking for this to be an automatic process. Let me decide which files to convert and which to not convert. Maybe make it a new choice in the show view pane. (Open the show to see info about it and a convert button is added.) In options set it up so these conversions are a low priority task, so they don't interfere with any other tasks Plex or the NAS are already doing. In the info for the given show, have a delete button next to the file names if more than one file is present. Then I can delete the pre-converted file and keep the new one.
If this is a functionality you don't want to use, then don't use it. I got Plex because I thought it would be able to handle things it turns out it isn't. In my case this is hardware, and not so much Plex itself, but if something like this can get past some of the hardware limitations, then I'm all for it!
Mike G.
