a lot of us here are power users, I would assume. I would like to see more details when PMS is syncing/converting/transcoding.
For example, I recently started to sync a TV show from my Android device and selected “Original” as the quality setting, assuming I would get the original file without any transcoding. However, PMS started to convert/transcode the show before sending it to the device. Why? I don’t know. Presumably the device doesn’t support the original’s format. But why do I have to make assumptions or guess? It would be nice if PMS would tell me why it is transcoding and what it is transcoding to.
Also, I think it would be awesome if PMS would show me the size of the transcoded files. I can check the size on the synced device, but not on PMS. Why?
The same can be said about the activity view when someone is streaming from your PMS and the stream is being transcoded. I very often see that it is actually being partly direct-streamed, e.g. the audio is transcoded and the video is just re-packed into a different container format. However, PMS tells me simply it’s transcoding audio and transcoding video, No details whatsoever.
These details would not just be interesting, they could actually help finding out what’s going wrong (if something goes wrong).
I think my point is simply give us more information about what’s going on when things are converted and transcoded.
Will be cool to see the original and target (selected by user) quality while sync.
Hard to understand the slowness while sync: is it related to server resources, PMS transcoding configuration or to simple user error related to selection of quality.
+1: I do not understand why files are getting transcoded on sync.
I am syncing to Android Tablet. The tablet is configured to support ‘original’ and as well advanced audio formats (e.g. DTS etc).
Yet every TV Show or Movie I sync gets first transcoded - then downloaded. I can sideload and view on the device without issues, thus confused as to why transcoding is deemed necessary by the Plex system.
My use case is to sync prior to a business trip and get content for the flight etc.
There are additional issues:
The time it takes to sync is excessive (due to transcoding and slow download)
The device after a while goes into sleep mode, stopping the sync. Thus I have to wake up the device multiple times and ‘tickle’ the sync operation to resume.
Given the long time to sync and the interruption it takes me hours to get the content I want.
It is MUCH faster to side-load the content in original format and watch with a different media player app - essentially making the sync feature of limited use. Pity - it was (along Camera upload) the main driver for the Plex Pass subscription.
I still value Plex for all the basic media functionality and was happy to support Plex with buying the Pass, but unfortunately it is not working well enough to truly justify the Plex Pass for the add-ons.
@robohofo said:
+1: I do not understand why files are getting transcoded on sync.
I am syncing to Android Tablet. The tablet is configured to support ‘original’ and as well advanced audio formats (e.g. DTS etc).
Yet every TV Show or Movie I sync gets first transcoded - then downloaded. I can sideload and view on the device without issues, thus confused as to why transcoding is deemed necessary by the Plex system.
My use case is to sync prior to a business trip and get content for the flight etc.
There are additional issues:
The time it takes to sync is excessive (due to transcoding and slow download)
The device after a while goes into sleep mode, stopping the sync. Thus I have to wake up the device multiple times and ‘tickle’ the sync operation to resume.
Given the long time to sync and the interruption it takes me hours to get the content I want.
It is MUCH faster to side-load the content in original format and watch with a different media player app - essentially making the sync feature of limited use. Pity - it was (along Camera upload) the main driver for the Plex Pass subscription.
I still value Plex for all the basic media functionality and was happy to support Plex with buying the Pass, but unfortunately it is not working well enough to truly justify the Plex Pass for the add-ons.
BTW: Camera Upload needs to handle video as well…
It’s done this way because the basic player on the device only supports so many codecs… By using those codecs (hardware decoded) saves battery.
Playing high bitrate files or another codec with HD audio and such requires a lot of software processing, thus kills battery.
Granted, I also wish “original” just copied the file, and I could play it back using “use external player”… But that’s not what plex decided on.
Keep in mind, android still uses sync v1, while ios uses sync v2, which works differently, allowing for playlist sync on top of other things.
I’d just like to see more details on the data transfer speed and completion eta.
Also, what protocol is used for the sync? Interrupted transfers seem to restart from the beginning, making it near impossible to sync on remote connections.
