Is there a way to make one category force direct play/direct stream and no allow transcoding at all and the other categories allow transcoding? I read this can be accomplished with third party tools but I’m wondering if Plex has a built in way to deal with it?
Reason I ask is I have a 4K movie category with all my 4k movies. I also have a bunch of 1080p categories as well. Right now the 4k movies are hidden from everyone except for me. I’m getting faster upload soon and thinking of opening up the 4k movies to a select number of my remote users, but I do NOT want them to transcode any of the movies. If they can’t play 4k then they have to live with the buffering or find the 1080p version instead.
The 1080p content I don’t mind if remote users transcode it down to 720p or 480p. I use hardware transcoding so it doesn’t put a strain on my CPU. But 4k to 720p would be too much.
I’ve found the “streaming brain” automatic selection of 2160p vs 1080p content to be pretty good; i.e clients get a version appropriate to their capabilities without unnecessary transcoding from 2160p. Yeah, someone can always try selecting something manually but no one in my family/friends bothers with that.
I do not know why people continue to treat 4K as a separate library and rip the same content two or more times, taking up storage space. Every 4K movie I have can be transcoded to something smaller so I just rip it at 4K and let Plex figure out how to properly send it to the clients that want access to it.
Disc space is cheap and a ready-to-go 1080p version adds maybe 10-15% of the that required for the relatively few 2160p versions.
Transcoding is almost always unnecessary when there’s a both a 2160p and 1080p version ready to go. And transcoding from 1080p to something lower is readily done on even a modest CPU.
