With the recent guide issues I'm having with TiVo, I'm looking at purchasing a Plex Pass and moving to the Plex DVR as that still has Gracenote guide data (which is an improvement in my area over the Rovi data). One item, however, would be how focused thumbnail generation can be. Most items in my Plex library don't need thumbnail generation (and the space/server hit that brings). However, in a Plex DVR world there are some items that would be of benefit. Morning news shows and daily chat shows, for example, are programs that my wife currently does a lot of fast-forwarding through until she sees something on-screen that she wants to see. She rarely watches them straight through and usually burns through the bulk of them on the weekend using this fast-forward 'catch-up'. She would definitely not buy-in to changing to Plex DVR without the visual cues on screen.
I'm assuming Plex DVR works the same as my current Plex library in that fast-forward of recorded shows doesn't show that visual cue without thumbnail generation. As I don't need thumbnail generation for the entire library of TV shows (thus saving the space and server load during generation) - but would need it for her daily news/chat shows - is it possible to have Plex only generate thumbnails on specific programs? I wouldn't care if it was even a manual task I had to initiate. Or is the only solution to have recorded TV in its own library? This wouldn't be ideal as I would prefer to have the recorded shows placed in the same TV library as already exists for ease of 'unwatched' filtering.