It's no secret that transcoding taxes the CPU in a big way. This has numerous drawbacks, such as limiting the amount of simultaneous streams, and sacrificing picture quality for performance.
The feature i'm asking for the ability to "have our cake and eat it". it would be awesome to have the choice of having permanent alternate files for certain clients. That way the server wouldn't have to star transcoding every time you try playing from a mobile device or a Roku box, or other clients for that matter. this has also the added benefit of being able to lower the bit rate and have a much better looking file than an even higher bitrate real-time encode.
For this to be practical, it should be user configurable (and obviously optional), by letting us choose the directory we want the alternate files stored on (so it plays nice with third party programs such as sickbeard, etc) and also letting us choose the bitrate and encoding quality.
I think this would be an amazing feature for people that want to keep their source files for some clients, but would like to be able to stream on other devices with out taxing the CPU a lot every time they use it on those clients.
Some users might even want their source files deleted after the conversion, if all they care about is certain clients and bitrates. or don't mind losing their source files in the name of space.
So think about it please. I think this would be an amazing feature for people that would like to either:
-Keep their original files, but don't want to tax the CPU when their roku/mobile clients use plex.
-People that want their transcodes to look better.
- And even people that want to keep their libary size in check for various reasons such as specific bitrates or simply because they want their libary converted to save space.
-It would make "sync" a much faster process too!
There's plenty of benefits for this feature and since it would be user configurable it would fit pretty much everyone's needs.
Anyway, thanks for reading this!
