[REQUEST] Transcoding agents.

Im not talking about Cloud.  If you have a PMS locally and your friend has one at their house that is shared with you - it shows up when browsing on DLNA on your server.

Sorry, trying to wrap my head around how this applies to multiple transcoding agents...  It's probably due to not yet having enough coffee on a post-pub morning, but I still can't get the connection.

I would also like this. I have a server that I use to upload to multiple clients out of the network but the cpu isn't that powerful. I also have a custom built rig that would handle the transcoding very nicely. 

+1 I need this feature.


I have a big house hold. When we all are watching movies my i7 machine cannot keep it up. So transcoding agents would be the perfect solution for this matter. Also for people who have a NAS and want to extend their transcoding power.


I would love to see this feature being realized

You can accomplish a lot of the same goals by transcoding the file offline before storing it on Plex.  Depending on the clients you use, it is often not too difficult to put the files in a format that is usable by most clients (especially Roku and iOS clients) once, upfront.

Then you can use your more beefed up machine upfront and not require any coding from Plex.  I use an unRAID box with a meager AMD Athlon II 605e.  Because I don't particularly care how long it takes to transcode a movie upfront, I have a process that finds movies that have not yet been transcoded and handles it.  If you encode to a Roku-friendly mp4, very little transcoding is required on most clients.  You could easily do this as part of putting a movie on the server in the first place and never worry about transcoding power on the NAS box. 

+1 to this feature. I also have NAS without power for transcoding and a lot of computer at home which can do it ... (ideal would be if work could be loadbalanced between all of my computers - I do not want to care which computer is running and it can happen that I need to transcode 10x fullhd in one moment ... - preprocessing is not solution for me). Would be even nicer, if agents would be open source, then developers could add support for special hw transcoding chips (like in Synology DS415 Play) and Plex would benefit from it for free ...

Transcoding offline is not really a solution, it’s more of a workaround. Although I would consider it. But my plex library is more than 20TB. It’s a lot of work and time to transcode all those files. I really do love plex but in my point of view transcoding before hand is not something of this century. The vision of Plex is easy and simple, and that your content is everywhere accessible.


I think if the plex development team would see the interest in this idea, they could actually realize it. I use 3dsmax for my job. At home I got a renderfarm set up with multiple computers/clients where the main computer has 3ds software on it and the clients have just a simple program/script running . This same idea could also be used for plex to build a transcodingfarm.

Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate