[Feature] Release clients with broad format support (so no need to transcode) #10541
pyorot
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An important note on the downsides you list for the current approach is that the original file is always kept, and transcoding is only done for playback compatibility - so things like metadata loss aren't really a concern. |
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I have searched the existing feature requests to make sure this is not a duplicate request.
The feature
This is kind of a meta-feature to consider long-term. I think transcoding mainstream formats in general is a bit cringe for several reasons:
* (currently, originals are always kept with intact metadata, but there could be a transcode policy one day that replaces them to alleviate storage usage)
To expand that last point, there will come a time when browsers drop support for h264, because it's not supported in webm, and will stop being updated and become "insecure". Web compatibility is not the same as backward compatibility, because the web is designed to coerce web designers into a set of modern, maintained formats.
I think the use-case of immich is rather more similar to that of vlc, mpc etc., in that we're supporting people's archives of original media dating back decades. As such, I'd like to advocate for the approach of making clients widely compatible rather than transcoding to "web" standards. Jellyfin is a good role model, in that they release clients that include universal media players based on ffmpeg (via mpv). Hopefully, the maintenance burden of all these formats is outsourced into the media player being forked.
Common use-cases are, of course,
Platform
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