My experience with changing Preview Thumbnails to 10 seconds

Plex Media Server
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1

So I made the jump to 10 second preview thumbnails instead of the default 2 second preview thumbnails. I also used the keyframe setting. It was a serious investment in time and took over a week to regenerate all my thumbnails. But, it was so worth it. Saved about 600-700GBs of SSD space. On Rokus, I can’t tell any difference at all. They work great as they always did.

The only difference I can see is that in the Dashboard, the thumbnails update every 10 seconds instead of every 2, but it really doesn’t matter much.

2

So…. how did you do this?

3
  1. disable the video previews in the properties of the libraries
  2. delete the existing preview thumbs in the same place
  3. edit the hidden server preference and set it to 10 seconds https://support.plex.tv/articles/201105343-advanced-hidden-server-settings/ GenerateBIFFrameInterval
  4. re-enable the preview thumbnails in all relevant libraries
  5. wait for the Plex butler to get done https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/

This is typed from memory. It may be that steps 1 and 2 are actually reversed.

4

GenerateBIFKeyframesOnly

Is the other setting I used.

Yes, make sure you Delete the thumbnails AND Disable them per library. Then re-enable after saving changes and Cleaning Bundles (just to make sure). You should see your HDD/SSD usage drop.