Question from New Plex User

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I am a new Plex user and was hoping to get some guidance on how best to use Plex and Infuse to watch my recordings via my home network. I record various movies and shows using a service called PlayOn Cloud. These are recorded at 720p resolution in mp4 format. I download the recordings and transfer them to a Synology DS1019+ (which I will soon be swapping to a DS2419+ to ensure my media library will not outgrow the NAS for a very long time). I have Plex set up on the NAS as well as on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (which runs a quad-core intel i7 processor at 2.7Ghz). The Plex player I am using is my Apple TV 4K. My entire set up is hardwired to my router and I have FIOS’ gigabit ethernet service (though I believe that is irrelevant as I am only streaming on my home network and not trying to stream from remote). I have Infuse set up on my Apple TV and it is connected to Plex (I have heard Infuse may be better at video processing than Plex and like it UI, though Plex’s is pretty nice as well). I’ve set the streaming quality on my Plex servers at the “maximum” setting. For all movies/shows I play (including ones that have subtitles), it appears from the info I can see in the settings tab, the Plex server is not doing any transcoding and “directly playing” the video. When I play a video via Infuse, I don’t have any quality setting options, but when I play it via the Plex app on my Apple TV, it offers various options like - play in original quality, convert automatically, convert to 720p (High), etc… I fund that if I select “convert automatically”, it consumes the CPU on my MacBook Pro (and if I use the plex server on my Synology, it seems to stutter a bit). What is “convert automatically” and is it any better than the play original quality setting? I have my Apple TV 4K set to 720p resolution, so a high-end video processor I use (Lumagen) will upscale the video to 4K before sending the signal to my Sony A1E OLED TV.

My sense is that for the above set-up, no transcoding or other type of conversion is needed, and I should just continue to play directly and not select the “convert automatically” option. I’ve spent a fair bit of time researching this issue but not 100 sure if I am missing something here.

Any thoughts/input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Vivek

2

Turn it off. You don’t need it when playing locally. It causes transcoding, which is killing the CPU on your systems. More info: Automatically Adjust Quality when streaming

Correct.

3

Thanks so much FordGuy61. This is very helpful and love the way you have responded in such a distilled manner to the key issues here!

Vivek

pingili_mac_com:

What is “convert automatically” and is it any better than the play original quality setting?

Turn it off. You don’t need it when playing locally. It causes transcoding, which is killing the CPU on your systems. More info: Automatically Adjust Quality when streaming

pingili_mac_com:

I have FIOS’ gigabit ethernet service (though I believe that is irrelevant as I am only streaming on my home network and not trying to stream from remote).

Correct.

4

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