What Media File Formats Do I Use With Plex?
Plex Media Server supports a wide range of media file formats that it can stream to clients. The clients determine what media formats Plex can stream without transcoding.
This is a concept that took a bit of time for me to fully understand, and from what I read online, it is a topic that can be hard for many to understand.
When I add media to my Plex server I try to ensure that I can get the media to direct play as much as possible to reduce the load on my server. My Plex server is an old desktop, so it can't do well at transcoding newer formats, so I am careful about having formats that don't need to be transcoded available to the Plex clients.
Hardware transcoding using a GPU does help, but the integrate Intel GPU in my server does have its limits.
In this post I will talk about the file formats I use on my Plex server, and also what I would do if I were to upgrade my server.
Movies and TV shows
I started using Plex over 9 years ago, and I didn't understand the concepts of direct play, direct streaming, or transcoding. Back then I would rip my Blu-ray discs and just try to stream them from Plex.
That didn't work too well.
Since then I have understood how to properly create my movies and TV show files to direct play from multiple different clients that I use to stream from my Plex server.
When I first started, the Plex clients I used weren't as powerful as they are today, so I had to be careful about how I transcoded my Blu-ray movies.
As I mentioned earlier, the clients determined whether a movie could be directly played, or needed to be transcoded.
With that in mind, the following sections talk about what formats and codecs I use currently for my movies and TV shows.
Container
The container is what some may consider the file format. It is the file that contains all the streams used by the movie. A stream can be video, audio, or subtitle and is contained within one file.
My preferred container type is Matroska (MKV). It is a container that is supported by all my clients and is the default format when I rip directly from my Blu-rays.
If I transcode to a lower quality to play on an older device, such as a device that has a lower resolution, I would use the MP4 container as it has the widest range of compatibility with older devices.
Video stream
To save space on my external hard drives, I always transcode the video stream to reduce the size. Since I have been running my Plex server for over 9 years, my movies are encoded using the h264 codec. This codec allows me to direct play the video stream on both older and newer devices.
For maximum compatibility, I have tried to keep the video stream under 20 Mbps as that was the streaming limit for my older Plex client. That client has since been replaced, so that limit no longer exists for me.
As I continue to replace my older clients, and eventually my Plex server hardware, I will switch over to the H265 codec which provides much better compression, which will reduce the file sizes even more.
I also provide lower-resolution copies of my movies to allow for direct play on devices that don't need full-resolution streaming, such as streaming remotely. These are the MP4 files I talked about earlier, and these files use even less space than the original MKV files.
Audio streams
For the full-quality Blu-ray rips, I always have three streams available:
- AAC stereo
- AC3 or DTS 5.1
- TrueHD or DTS-MA
For most streaming I do at home I use the AAC stereo track as I don't have a surround sound system. I keep the other tracks because this will allow me to have the surround sound available when I do have a sound system, and I wouldn't like to re-rip my Blu-rays just to add the sound streams.
The files that were created from a DVD, I only include the first two tracks, and exclude the third as neither TrueHD or DTS-MA are available for DVD movies.
For my lower-quality MP4 files, I just include the AAC stereo stream as I will be streaming those movies from a device that won't be connected to a surround sound system.
Subtitles
While I don't use subtitles when watching movies, I always burn in the forced subtitles. I include the English subtitles as an option, though.
For the high-quality rips of my Blu-ray movies, I use the following:
- Container: MKV
- Codec: h264 (H265 in future)
- Audio:
- AAC stereo
- AC3 or DTS 5.1
- TrueHD or DTS-MA
- Subtitles: Forced (burned in)
English (included)
While I don't have any 4K, yet, when I do they will be using the H265 codec.
Music
For the music that I rip from my music CDs, the file format is much simpler.
I exclusively use the FLAC code for multiple reasons. These reasons include:
- Lossless format so no audio quality is lost.
- Smaller in size than a WAV file - the other popular lossless audio format.
- Includes metadata that can be used by Plex to display information about the audio track
- Supported by all my Plex clients.
There is no other format that I would use for my music files with Plex. The FLAC format not only allows me to stream music at full CD quality, they also can double as the backup files to my music CDs.
At this time, there is no other music format I am looking to use that will replace my FLAC files.
This post has outlined the file formats I use for the media that I stream from Plex server. The codecs and formats I have chosen for my media have allowed me to direct play the media from my Plex server without any issues.
