With my Plex Media Server running on a small SSD, I wanted to minimize (but not get rid of) the size of the Video Preview Thumbnails.
I see the " GenerateBIFFrameInterval " and “THUMBNAIL_QUALITY” variable in Preferences.xml and also the “plex_generate_vid_previews” utility. Currently trying the changes in the Prefs file.
My server is currently regenerating all of the video preview thumbnails, but not clear on how to check if its working or working properly. I didn’t check the size of the metadata folder or Plex Media folder before I made the change and deleted the thumbnails in the libraries.
Is there a guideline or rule of thumb that I can look at the thumbnails with MediaInfo - for example - and figure out if my changes are working as intended?
A less exact approach would be to play something that has thumbnails generated, and check when the thumbnail changes when hovering over the seekbar. As mentioned in the thread above though, GenerateBIFKeyframesOnly=1 can make that less accurate, since Plex might generate duplicate thumbnails depending on the media’s keyframe interval.
It’s an app, not a plugin, and only relations to the old one is part of the name as well as some functionality and same developers, so it runs on your desktop
Looks like I’m gong digging into bundles to see whats there.
Out of curiosity, do recommend using the KeyframesOnly=1 or =0? I’ve seen mixed thoughts on the pros/cons/benefits. I’ve had a few movies that hung up the thumbnail process, and I presume it was encoding related. Wondering if its an issue worth trying to avoid or just stick with using the keyframes and deal with any hiccups that pop up.
If it matters, I’m running on Ubuntu 24.04 with a Intel Core i5-12600K and 16gb RAM.
IMO it’s best to keep the default (1). You’ll get more accurate thumbnails with it disabled, but I personally don’t use them enough to warrant the extra processing power. If you/the people you share with do make heavy use of them, it could be worth it - your CPU is powerful enough to easily handle it, it will just take a bit longer to generate.
Not sure whether changing it would help with the issues you’ve seen though. Sometimes disabling keyframe-only generation can help things ( Generating video preview thumbnails keeps redoing a handful of specific episodes over and over.), but there are probably cases where the reverse is true, and keeping keyframe-only generation would help. At that point though I’d rather do something about the source file opposed to adjusting thumbnail generation settings to get things unstuck.
