Feature Request
I would like to see Plex add support for more compact data formats for its Media and Metadata folders.
Specifically, I would like Plex to convert non .webp files to .webp and store them in this format if the file is smaller (which it almost always will be) in order to reduce the amount of space taken up by the many, many small files a media library (and its metadata) can require.
This may require some support between the server and client in order to determine whether it’s okay for the server to pass .webp files, or if on-demand conversion to .jpeg or .png may be required.
It may also make sense to make this an option, so the user can decide whether to prioritise size versus compatibility for their Media/Metadata folders depending upon whether they have older client programs to support or not.
Reasoning
I recently had to shuffle around how I’m organising my data on a macOS system that runs Plex Media Server, and I was surprised to find just how huge my ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server was, over 12gb!
The bulk of the storage used is in the Metadata folder (9.9gb), followed by the Media folder (1gb), and this is with video thumbnails/previews disabled, no ahead-of-time transcoding etc. So the content is entirely posters/thumbnails/backgrounds etc.
It really does just seem to be a case of many, many tiny files adding up, and in my case at least the bulk of these seem to be images – some are .pngs (not the most space efficient format) though many don’t have file extensions (especially in the metadata folder) so I’m not 100% sure what they are, but of those I tried I was able to open them by adding either .jpeg or .png to their name.
Conversion to .webp however can result in files typically around a third of the size of equivalent files using .jpeg (for lossy conversion) or .png (for lossless conversion), which is why it such an increasingly common image format for websites. Since lossless conversion isn’t really critical for Plex, the savings could be even greater by allowing lossy conversion in all cases, as .webp generally handles lossy conversion very well (the default quality should give no discernible loss of detail).
Regardless, even with quite a large media library, it seems silly for Plex’s index data to amount to tens of gigabytes, so anything that can be done to reduce this would be an improvement IMO.
