Has there been any thought to having indexing done on the fly.
I turned off indexing because of the amount of space that was required to back up the Plex Library, but I love being able to fast-forward on the roku and see where I am. It seams like a bit of a waste to me to index everything, but an on the fly indexing for what I am watching now would be amazing.
Thoughts?
I have had similar thoughts but I do index most everything as I have plenty of processing power and plenty of space.
While this would be an advantage I suspect that the processing power required combined with the need for that processing to be well ahead of the point in the file where you are watching would make it nearly impossible on most systems.
Also the manner that index files are created would make in hard to do. Index files are created by capturing a series of frames from the file and them assembling them into single file with indexes corresponding to time indexes in the original file. I doubt that could be accomplished on the fly.
One thing that might be a half way measure that would work for me would be the ability to turn indexing on and off by library. Or even have an advanced setting in the database that allows an override of the "Indexes off" flag so that you can have indexing off for everything but have certain files or sets of files indexed.
I agree that indexing will not work on the fly: the process takes quite some time and CPU power. I also assume that you would like to have the index-pictures available as soon as you start a movie and not only after for example 15 minutes.
AFAIK it's possible to have only certain movies or folders indexed but there is no way I know about to do this from the GUI.
You can trigger indexing for single entries or library using a command line: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201242707-Plex-Media-Scanner-via-Command-Line
The following command-line should schedule indexing for the section 29 (library with the ID-number 29)
/path/to/Plex\ Media\ Scanner --index --section 29
You should have enabled indexing in your scheduled tasks, the indexing will happen during the time specifies there.
I hope this helps
2021 clean-up: duplicate
