No, that is wholly dependent on the type of subtitles and the type of Plex client.
Could you post a link to this page?
That should be “Burn Subtitles”, which describes the behaviour better.
In theory, ‘Automatic’ should decide automatically, based on the type on the subtitle.
‘Always’ means just that.
‘Image format only’ means only PGS and VOBSUB subs are burned in. (These subtitle formats are based on images/bitmaps and not on text)
But there are currently some bugs around this, so it might not always do what it is supposed to do.
This option won’t help you much to avoid transcoding. Whatever you do, don’t set it to ‘Always’.
First rule to avoid transcoding: dont use subtitles.
If you need subtitles, burn them into the video picture before adding the file into Plex.
If you don’t want to do that, or cannot do that, make at least sure that your subtitles are in the SRT text format, because this is the format which most Plex clients can handle without transcoding.
Still there may be many situations where transcoding is necessary. If you need selectable subtitles, then these situations will occur more often. That is the reality. There is nothing you can do, unless you tightly control which type of Plex client is used by your users.
If you cannot control that, you need to invest in a stronger server, which is able to transcode.
Do you know any software to record a subtitle on the video?
If I set ‘recorded subtitles’ to ALWAYS or AUTO,
Can you tell me if transcoding will only occur the first time that a customer accesses, and a copy will be saved?
OR
Whenever a customer accesses, will it be necessary to make a new transcode?
A little trial and error is likely, but I rarely come away empty from any of those resources - unless subs just don’t exist and that’s rare.
If I have subtitles, but they don’t exactly fit - I can sometimes make them fit with: https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/
Basically, if you need to do something to subs - that’ll do it… and then some.
