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I don't use transcoding for Plex at all. I've found it much better to stream directly to a client like Infuse and have it use the client's native hardware decoding. Now granted, this is only really feasible if you're streaming within your own house, but it works great. Plex can be run on any dinky little system that way and have no trouble serving up full bitrate UHD rips.

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Direct streaming is great but I wish you could enforce it natively from the server side.

The challenge is getting your friends and family to change the default prefer-transcoding behavior every time they fire up a new client.

I know you can use tricks like tautulli events to terminate transcode streams but they're difficult to deploy and a bad UX for the users even at their best. Better to have Plex tell users something like "This content can't be played at your preferred bitrate X, would you like to use more data to play at full bitrate Y? Yes/No/Always"

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