You transcode any time that the player your’re viewing on doesn’t support native playback of the source file.
for instance; you have a h.265 encoded video on the server and you have a tablet that doesn’t have the hardware to decode 265 then the server will transcode (decode and re-encode) to a format that is supported.
this is just an example as there are numerous situations where your PMS may need to transcode.
transcoding is certainly not ideal but it happens. all the time.
What Roy Said. Also, more often then not subtitles are not supported by devices (in my experience), and plex transcodes to “enable” subtitles for such services.
As for staying away from cloud services, i can understand the point IF your are looking at metered services.
I have been through many various iterations of PMS configurations and the best possible scenario I have come up with looks like this;
Google Drive (unlimited) for storage
Windows 10 with PMS installed on a local dedicated machine with an NVMe drive for the host - AMD Ryzen 2700x /16GB Ram (Plex cant use more than 4GB)
NetDrive3 for connection to Google Drive.
I have a ton of other custom stuff running on the PMS box but that is for acquisition. The above is for hosting and streaming.
It is the most perfect a situation as I can come up with. perfect remote access. perfect management from everywhere. I mean hell… i cannot come up with another setup that works better and I have been using PMS since '13
In addition I would be remiss not to mention that I have a Drobo with a program called InSync that I use for backup.
You read that right. My local onsite NAS is the backup to my Google Drive (not the other way around).
I used to run it the other way around before I found NetDrive3 but 3 bad hard drives in a row destroyed my NAS dataset (all three drives from the same batch died within 3 days of each other).
Now I stream everything from Google Drive with NetDrive3 and its smooth and flawless.
I run InSync to copy my Googe Drive to my local NAS but that’s just a backup.
