I’m looking for a way to always show all manual transcoding profiles in the client. This would help me to quick fix situation when the plex algorithm is doing bad choices.
For example, I have a 1080p x265 series with a 2.3Mbps bitrate with 27 subtitles. Some Samsung TV doesn’t support as many subtitles, so the auto mode (direct play) never start playing the video.
In order to fix this, I would like to manually select transcoding, but the only profiles ares
2 Mbps 720p
1.5 Mbps
720 Kbps
320 Kbps
The transcoding profile in 720p x264 at 2Mbps provide a really bad video and sound quality. A transcoding from 1080p x265 slow to x264 720p fast require an higher bitrate to get equivalent quality.
Like this example, some times it happends that I need to force transcoding to save me from a device which badly support an option from the input file (an x265 encoding option, etc).
So, is there a way to tell a plex clients to show all (or more) transcoding profiles?
Unfortunately, optimize require web server access and only works for me (plex home users/friends cannot create optimization). This could be a last resort workaround, notez!
I’m wondering how the transcoding is negotiated between the client and the server. Is there a list of profiles sent by the server and the client filter them based on assumptions? Or it’s the server which provide the complete list?
If the manual selection into players could not be more wealthy, I noticed the issue is mainly involving transcoding from x265. I have the feeling that plex transcoding selection algorithm doesn’t take into account the codec performance when filtering the bitrate. For example, it could make sense to propose transcoding for 1080p 4Mbps x265 to 1080p 8Mbps x264 to keep image (and sound quality). Is this something the plex team would like to look at?
Do you really want anyone who uses your system to schedule optimizations and consume space? I, as admin of my system, want to know of such things and be in control of how it’s optimized. My family is tech savvy but not streaming savvy.
No, like you, I don’t want my friends and family have access to optimization settings. This will waste space, introduce garbage collection policy, still require on-the-fly encoding depending of the subtitle or network. There is a lot of reason why I not consider this as a solution. Currently, I’m trying to make the original files more “compatible”.
Give them access to a larger choice of on-the-fly transcoding profiles would be a interesting solution. But maybe fixing the filter algorithm between x265 and x264 would help already help.
