Plex is easily one of our favorite ways to stream your media between devices. Sometimes, however, streaming can take a long time depending on what format your media is in. Use Plex’s optimize feature to solve this problem ahead of time and get smooth playback anywhere.


Plex uses a transcoding feature to change your media to a format that works on the device your watching it on. You can think of it like a universal translator. Normally, Plex does this translation on the fly, but that can take up precious processing power. This can lead to slow or jittery playback. To compensate for this, Plex has a little-known feature that can pre-optimize your videos. It will convert your media to a streaming-friendly format ahead of time, so it’s ready to stream when you are. To find the feature, perform the following steps:

Open your media library and pick a movie or TV show episode that you want to optimize. Click the menu button on the thumbnail for your chosen movie. Click “Optimize...” Choose from the optimization drop down to pick a quality level and where to store the optimized files.


Tech tips site How-To Geek has more information about which settings you should use at the source link below. Once you pick your optimization choices, Plex will start converting your media. Then, the next time that you need to play your movies, it will be ready to go. This will take up more storage space on your media server, but it should make streaming much smoother.

How to Optimize Your Movies and TV Shows For Smooth Plex Playback | How-To Geek