Not sure if this is possible or not, but with media libraries growing many have began embracing cloud technologies to compliment their Plex server setups and allow for more archiving and storage retention. I have been testing CloudDrive for this purpose, and for the most part it works very well, so well in fact, I began using it to archive other items like PC backups and such.
These products generally have prefetch settings to help avoid buffering issues, but the problem is these settings cannot discriminate between something that requires Quality of Service, like Plex, and something that may not matter. So my feature request is, if possible, to add an option to plex in which when a video is requested to be played, Plex begins copying said video to a configured cache directory (i.e. the Transcode directory), and once the copy starts, it begins playing the file from that cache directory, regardless of whether the stream is transcoded, directplay, etc. When the video stops, finishes or session is otherwise terminated, plex can kill the copy or delete the cache file if the copy completed.
This would essentially put the “prefetching” task on Plex, guaranteeing that the right bits are being fetched and minimizing potential for buffering.
I’d imagine this may come in handy for other scenarios too such as slower drives, WAN/VPN scenarios, or even media that’s on a drive that is being heavily utilized. The idea being the configured cache directory would be a local drive that would have reasonable performance and wouldn’t add to any bottlenecks.
I realize this is probably not something that most people would want nor need, but figured it can’t hurt to post it up! 
If there is already a way to do this with plugins or other advanced features, I’d love to hear about it.
-Ed
