I am trying to understand the best way to organize my media with the goal as much as possible to not have the Plex server transcode. where I am really struggling is dealing with the support of older devices mostly not upgraded simply because the TV / receiver they are attached to has not yet been either.
First item i am trying to figure out (looking through the guides and docs i do not see) please feel free to point to one I am happy to read it
A few assumption:
4k and above not a requirement no 4K devices (tv or streaming at this time) so we are talking 1080p but would love to support the best possible audio stream. also I would also love in the general case not to be transcoding
Container formats (MP4, MKV, ā¦)?
most of my content today is MP4 mostly because I have older apple tvās (Pre app store so no Plex app) and I have been running an iTunes server along side Plex Media Server.
How to handle multiple media that has multiple audio streams? What is the recommendation here again different devices and supported codecs the goal remember is to try and avoid transcoding but transcoding audio could be ok. again looking for recommendation from the community.
Please feel free to suggest other items that might be relivent here on this topic as well i am trying to learn.
Thereās a reason youāre not seeing stuff in the docs. Plex is built around transcoding in order to provide the experience they advertise.
You can search the forums and read the countless long threads of other people who keep banging their heads against this, frustrated that they canāt make Plex be something itās not and do something it wasnāt designed to do. Itās really a futile effort, akin to saying āI want to buy this car, but how can I successfully drive everywhere I want to go without switching out of 3rd gear?ā
The variables that determine transcoding are numerous, and only a few are under your control. You have to go through a massive amount of pre-transocding, keeping multiple versions of files, changing tons of settings, restricting to only local clients (no remote streaming) AND be hyper-OCD about all your clientsā settings and what clients can connectā¦ and even then you canāt always prevent transcoding.
yeah I understand and i do not want to turn off transcoding this is a great feature i am just try to reduce it to when the client is local network and I am really trying to avoid buying new devices until i get to the point of also upgrading the equipment around it like the tv and receiver
Thank you @TeknoJunky on the recommendations for the apple devices I also have a few FireStick (non 4K) and I have found that the support for formats is better at least with my content that as @sremick has said is due to my OCD on converting the files to support all these great devices.
Can either of you help me to understand what Plex does or likely does if there are multiple audio tracks in a given container say like the example above lets say mp4 container 1. video track, 1 audio track (aac 6 channel) and 1 audio track (DTS) . It seems like it is choosing the best but that could just be my luck.
also if I was going to upgrade the client devices i am curious what you might recommend while in the past I might have just got the Apple device. not that it is a bad thing. it seems like the two front runners are the Nvidia Shield and Apple TV but open to all devices as I am not locked into any eco system enough that it would cause a problem.
As far as I can tell, the only devices which will actually pick the ābestā audio track are the Roku and the the Plex Media Player. The rest of the devices always select the first audio track in your preferred language, which is usually a stereo AAC track if you follow the usual guidelines proposed here.
That applies to all containers, even if you have a ādefaultā track assigned with in an MKV file.
