I have a TV that can play one of a set of codecs, so sometime transcoding is needed. My server is not powerful enough to do a lot of the transcoding tasks that may come - and it entirely kills it when it comes to 4K.
Note: I’m not entirely sure which codecs I can support, because I can’t find any place that will tell me what it supports … I can only see that a codec isn’t supported when plex decides to transcode rather than direct stream
It would be ideal for me, if I could pre-transcode (optimize) movies, but to any one of a set of codecs. Ideally, if a movie was in a supported codec (has both an audio stream, and a video stream, in a supported codec), it would be left alone, while if it wasn’t, it would be transcoded to one of the supported ones.
The user flow could be:
- Each client Plex knows (mobile, browsers, TV, …) records their supported Codecs (list of video / audio codecs)
- User designates a group of devices as a “optimization target group”
- Plex finds the common codecs between these devices (the user should be warned not to group mobiles and 4K tv’s in one group)
- If a movie doesn’t match the codecs that are allowed within a target group, the content is transcoded / optimized ahead of time, so that one of the allowed codecs is used instead.
Note: Plex should have some way of determining which codecs are better, so that the user doesn’t need to prioritize the target codecs, but rather Plex “just makes it work”.
Notes:
- It would be ideal if optimization of audio didn’t copy the video stream, see this FR
