Server Version#: 1.19.5.3112
Player Version#: 4.34.3
I have my media collection on a Zyxel NAS326
The Zyxel has an ARMv7 processor – it’s rather slow and clearly not poised for any kind of preprocessing.
Thus, I have ripped, transcoded and muxed my DVDs into H264 streams in MKV containers making movie watching using the Plex app for WebOS on my LG tv smooth and appealing (as in the Plex web player) – this post is not about movie watching.
Similarly, all my photos have been converted from RAW into JPEG – a format probably understood by all types of clients.
When accessing my photo collection with the WebOS app as well as with the Web player the indexes folder, year, timeline load reasonably fast with thumbnails metadata and all.
However, when attempting to open a photo there is a considerable lag of roughly 15 seconds from clicking the thumbnail and until the full image appears. Flicking to the next image is fast enough (probably due to caching) but the next image again takes similarly long time to load.
This renders the Plex app useless for casually browsing my photo collection or looking up a particular shot amongst many.
My network connection is not the problem – mounting the NAS as a network drive, I can access the photos with a standard image viewer – e.g. Xnview – and flick through images as fast as I can hit the PgDn key – there is virtually no loading time. Network speed is good and client rendering time is negligible.
Why not, then, simply using Xnview for browsing photos? Clearly: Plex indexing, thumbnail creation enables really useful interfaces such as the timeline view and hopefully in the future a map interface to geotagged images. Also it is of great value having one stop access to all media on the NAS.
From reading threads in this forum, I understand that the waiting time may be associated with the server transcoding – or rather resizing – the images on request of the client – this obviously takes some time on my weak processor – and something which could clearly be done more efficiently in the client. Resizing is happening all the time in HTML based clients without any obstacle experienced by the user.
So my question: will it be possible to add a setting (or, am I missing something among the Plex Pass enabled settings) to the client (in my case; the Web Player and the WebOs app) letting the client request non-transcoded images from the server? Or is there another workaround to this unbearable waiting?
Cheers
/per
