I have a grossly underpowered QNAP NAS running Plex. It literally cannot transcode even a single video stream. Unfortunately there’s no server side setting that allows me to completely disable transcoding. And I have absolutely no need for transcoding:
- I have gigabit LAN and internet so there’s no bandwidth issues on the server side.
- All of my media should be directly playable by all of my devices.
- Even if a device could not play the media, I have no ability to transcode it anyway, all it does is crush my NAS resources and eventually fails to play anyway. It would be better if an immediate error were presented to the client than to wait N minutes of struggling to have the file eventually fail for whatever reason (my recollection is a generic error is presented, which isn’t very helpful to anyone).
My workaround is to try to remember to setup all of my new Plex devices to set the quality to “original” or “max” in all of the various settings. Assuming I remember.
Overall a very poor user experience that this setting is not available. We’re not all running quad core i7 CPU with NVIDIA GPU.
