I am wanting to get away from Transcoding as much as possible, I’ve been researcing trying to find the perfect method for movies and shows to get them to Direct Play only, but I’m hitting roadblocks. Let me break down my stats and see if anybody here has a solution.
My server is just Stacked 5TB drives connected through USB 3.0, I’m upto 30TB total. My system is a Windows 10 PC with a quadcore i7 doing all the heavy lifting. I currently share my media with about 90 users. My system WILL run upto about 8 Transcodes at a time, but any more than that it starts to choke, and obviously the system could run 300 Direct Plays and not even burp, I have done the optimization for one move as a test, but that required 9 different versions of the movie and would require a ton of storage to accommodate my library (over 3000 movies and 14,000 episodes). My question is, has anyone figured out the perfect method for movies to be encoded as such that they don’t need transcoding or am I kind of screwed here?
Transcoding is totally dependent on what the device your users are using is capable of direct playing. That many users and the different possible devices they could be using is unpredictable. Have you tried converting everything down to 720p as MP4? My Amazon Fire TV stick is capable of direct playing everything I have in my library, my Roku stick on the other hand everything is transcoded.
Yeah, I’ve tried 9 different optimization options, and they all work for different devices, but I don’t want to have to tell everyone they have to have this one kind of device, especially if it’s not inexpensive. I’d like to keep everything at 1080p as mp4’s. I was curious about the various sticks and which ones work best
I plan on running a test platform on Tuesday, take a movie that also has subtitles and try various handbrake encodings, see which ones play out the best. Does handbrake insert subtitles so they don’t have to be transcoded?
