Video Transcoding Tips? Streaming ANY Vid Maxes my CPU

[kettlnaut]

I have an i3 sandy bridge 3.4 ghz multithreaded (dual core but shows 4 cores in windows) with 16GB of DDR3, a Nvidia 9800GT 1GB-DDR3, and a crapton of all sata drive space. I was running Win7 x64 Pro, recently upgraded to Win 8. no issues from the upgrade whatsoever, but this started before the Win 8 upgrade. Just curious if there are any tips I should know for optimizing settings for video streaming. Or if there is a plugin I should use.

Googling around I saw someone said convert all your videos to mp4, but I have a ton of videos and that would take next to forever, even on my current rig. Is this what subsonic folks suggest or is there a better way. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

[kettlnaut]

OK so I lied, Mp4 files do indeed seem to play fine without maxing my CPU so I guess that is the answer. Sucks but knowing that is what it will take, guess I gotta just suck it up and find time to do it. Would be great if you guys could find a way to use VLC as transcode plugin. I not a dev so I have no clue how though so I guess I will just convert to mp4. This is still the bestest piece of software ever!

[bushman4]

Before you do that, I would update ffmpeg.exe to the latest version. It is located in c:\subsonic\transcode. Newest versions are located here:
http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

You want the latest "static" build for your version of Windows (32 bit or 64 bit).

Then try to transcode from whatever format you have now on the fly...

Glenn