Got it. I’ll be redoing my presets to make sure its off. I only have a few anyway so no biggie.
This is one of the things you absolutely need to adapt to the source.
Right along with the deinterlacing/decombing filter.
Don’t try to use a generic preset for all sources, or the quality of the encodes will suffer.
Thanks for the tips. I know to look out for that when I rip my Anime DVD’s and always check to make sure which one or both is needed. Generally don’t need it with my Blu Ray’s though.
At any rate, this whole exercise has made me realize I need to take more time with this. Thanks all.
Also note that per Handbrake’s docs, leaving Anamorphic ON will not affect non-anamorphic sources:
“Typically recommended that you leave this on “loose”. If your source is not anamorphic, having this set to an anamorphic option will not affect the output. Thus, it is safe to leave on.”
Yeah, that’s what the docs say. Alas I have seen many encodes which had the anamorphic flag activated without cause.
If the answer to my question is somewhere in this thread, I apologize. All these numbers…my head is swimming! But along the same topic, I’m trying to figure out how Plex defines a “720” movie, because, if a user has their streaming set to “720,” what will Plex play as direct stream, and what will Plex transcode down? If I have a movie that is 1726x720, is that (as defined by Plex) a 720 movie to be direct streamed? Or does Plex see that first number, the width of 1726, and say, “No, that is not a 720 movie, because 720 video is 1280 wide. That is bigger than 1280x720, so it must be transcoded down to 1280x534.” Know what I mean?
That’s a question I can’t answer. Does Plex ignore the actual resolution and go strictly by what it labeled it as or does it take the actual resolution into account when deciding to transcode or not?
Until this problem happened to me I would say however it was labeled by Plex. But since that could possibly be wrong (bad encode), I don’t know.
I guess it would be easy enough to test! I’ll report back. Thanks.
Hi there! Did you ever get results from your testing? I’m curious about this too.
I THINK I figured something out about this, and I’m sure I could do a little more testing if I wanted to be completely sure, but I can’t go any further down that rabbit hole. Accurate or not, the following is good enough for me.
Most of the people who watch movies on my Plex server have their preferred resolution set to “720.” So I down-converted the pixel height of my movies from “1080” to “720.” The standard resolution of 720 movies is 1280x720. When I would resize the height to 720, the width would not always be 1280. Frequently, due to the pixel/size ratio of the movie, the width would be wider, like 1310 x 720. I noticed, then, that when someone would stream that movie, Plex would still transcode it to a width of 1280 x (whatever the ratio works out to). In the case of 1310 x 720, Plex would transcode it to 1280 x 704.
So (because I might be a little OCD), I further down-converted my library, making everything 1280 x ____. I have seen better performance on the new 1280 movies with more Direct Play and less Transcoding. I could be wrong about this, but my half-a**ed conclusion is that when you set your Plex limits to 720, Plex is actually looking for that first number…1280, and making the assumption that if the width is 1280, then it follows that the height is probably 720 or less. In other words, if Plex streams a 1310 x 720 movie, it does not consider that movie to be a “720” movie. It sees it as a larger movie and, therefore, transcodes that movie down to 1280 x 704.
If anybody has a better understanding about this and wants to explain it better and point out the flaws in my conclusion, feel free!
That is correct, because it doesn’t fit into the 1280x720px area of a 720p video.
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