I just got a second hand LG tv on webos 3.0 and plex works fine apart from UHD content. It turns out the the TV only has 2,4Ghz wifi so not enough bandwidth to receive UHD content (I have another TV with a 5Ghz connection that works fine).
When away from home and watching videos through a browser, I am able to set the bit rate to “auto” or somesuch and an automatic, realtime transcoder kicks in and matches the bit rate of the video to the available bandwidth that I have.
If i can get this to work in my TV then the server should notice that there is not enough bandwidth and then transcode it down automatically.
I do not seem to be able to find a way to get this to work on the tv though, is there a way?
Are you using the Plex app for this TV or just the generic DLNA-compatible player, which is pre-installed on the TV?
If the latter, this won’t work. You can only attach a player device per HDMI, which has a Plex client available. nVidia Shield, Apple TV, Fire TV, Android TV box etc.pp.
My TV is not does not have enough network bandwidth to receive some of the very high bit rate UHD files that I have because it only has a 2.4Ghz wifi chip. My other TV has a 5Ghz wifi chip and so has no trouble with the heavy bandwidth requirement.
I want me plex server to detect that not enough bandwidth is available and then transcode the file down to a lower bit rate automatically.
This exact same thing happens when watching in web browsers over the internet so all the important bits seem to be there but it’s not behaving this way with my TV.
Maybe there is a way to trick the server into thinking that the TV is in a remote location?
AFAIK every Plex client has a setting where you can restrict the bandwidth. Set this to e.g. 20 mbps.
If the selected file has a higher bandwidth, Plex server will automatically switch to Transcoding mode.
However, currently this won’t work satisfactorily, because
transcoding 4k HEVC video requires a shed load of computing power. Unless you have a suitable hardware transcoder, transcoding will be too slow.
Plex cannot yet convert from HDR to SDR, so the resulting video will look flat with washed-out colors.
You are looking for this, https://support.plex.tv/articles/115007570148-automatically-adjust-quality-when-streaming/, but pretty sure the smart TV apps don’t support it yet (at least that is how the article reads, I don’t use smart TV apps, I use a Shield TV personally but generally prefer to use an external device for my streaming needs and not be tied to the TV’s OS).
I have the compute power, more than i could ever need.
I can manually select a lower bit rate through the plex app but it’s tedious going through them all one by one until i find the maximum possible bit rate that my connection will support. I’d like it to happen automatically.
Did not know about HDR to SDR though, thanks for the heads up.
Yes that is what I am looking for. It’s a shame that TV apps appear to be unsupported. This feature has been out for 2 years now but still not n TV apps.
