That sounds a bit cargo cultish We generally sort by quality. But I know that we’re working on improved support for those sort of dual-quality scenarios.
Thanks, I’ve passed this over to the Android team and chatted with them about it. They had actually already done some work on that sort of capability setting, but had trouble getting it working with DTS over optical (which, in your case, clearly wouldn’t matter).
That’s the work I’m referring to above; we may have already landed part or all of it, everyone who knows is out at the moment.
That’s good they’re working on it. Everything I have in 4K I also have in 1080p for transcoding purposes, but it always chooses the 4K. As you’re most likely aware, transcoding 4K + HDR doesn’t work well and all the colors are washed out, so I’d really like Plex to not do that. To get around it I have to have two libraries for movies, one with everything (4K+1080p) and one with just 1080p.
Agree it is but unfortunately the procedure I mentioned is what is needed to be done by the admin when adding files. There is no smart choosing in any app except the Roku that I recall.
What I mentioned is the only way to get the 1080p version as the “original” file so it will be used as the default and also as the file used for transcoding. Long standing issue. Previously it was asked for when people want 720p vs 1080p. Now it’s 1080p vs 4K but still the same issue.
I think the old Roku that Rob did was the only app that could do intelligent selection as he sort of had his own version of “streaming brain”/decision making. I know the other clients I use will choose the wrong file.
This was one of the topics covered in the “Cayars thread of tips and tricks”.
It’s worse now than it used to be back then, though. Every Plex play used to prompt when you would play an item which resolution they wanted to play. Plex removed that (great) functionality and hid the button, and most of the family members using my Plex don’t ever remember to use it.
As far as I can tell, the Roku still makes the right choice on which version to play. I don’t share with a lot of people, but most of them use Rokus regularly, and Tautuli tells me which version is going out and it always seems to be the one that I think is appropriate for the system the Roku is connected to. I pretty much know what the users have, and encode versions to accommodate to avoid transcoding.
It became a habit quickly to make sure I added the version I wanted as the default first to Plex. for the same reasons @cayars mentioned. If not, the dumb apps would choose the wrong version to play, or transcoding would take the wrong version to transcode from.
It took some trial and error, but generally I have remote users direct playing all of the time.
Except my daughter’s iPad. I’m absolutely positive that there is no possible way to encode a file that will direct play on that thing. I have completely accepted that Plex will transcode from h264 to h264 at the same bitrate and resolution , even if you select the version manually that should direct play,
@elan thanks for that. How likely are we to see the codec selection options appear in the near future? It really should be there for parity across players, the DTS issue for me is so frustrating.
To summarise, it’s clear to me that everyone here wants to be able to manually select the media at file selection level (to choose different bitrate, 8bit,10bit, or different resolution) , or more at audio codec level, which is available as UI in Android TV etc., but doesn’t always work.
We appreciate that plex tries to smartly determine which codec is supported by the player but when it fails, due to wrong EDID or plex bug or different ways of how we connect our home theatre system, we really appreciate a manual selection to override the process.
whether this means that we will be getting the ability back to select a server first, then then have a list of libraries on that server and search content only on that server?
if so, whether this will extend to Android and not just Roku?
what the approximate timeline is for this?
At the moment I have all my users (family) sitting on Android 6.17 (the last usable version) as a stopgap measure, with local authentication disabled. But I have canned my Plex pass and am just about at the point of pulling the trigger on a migrating my family to Emby (which is working pretty well on my test setup). I would prefer not to have to do so, but it kind of depends on whether and when this abomination of an interface will be fixed.
Some more communication around direction and specifics would be really appreciated.
Since you’re opening up: why is it that it took pushback from the Roku update to get you moving on this subject when the issue was already raised on PMP, PlayStation, Xbox, Android (and possibly iOS?)?
Is it fair to assume Roku is your largest platform at this point and the amounts of complaining overwhelms the feedback you had on other platforms?
That was my assumption as we complained a lot when Plex utterly buggered the nice original UI of the app on Amazon Fire TV (which was very like the UI of the Roku app before Plex utterly buggered that too) but our complaints were ignored. It seems that there are a lot more people using Roku than Fire TV either that or they complained much more loudly.
That is certainly true, but it’s not like we didn’t have an idea of the problems the new design had, and hadn’t already been discussing ways to improve it. The reaction to Roku definitely … accelerated the process
Perhaps a Non-Roku Specific announcement stating this exact thing highlighted at the top of the forums would go a long way to quieting down the hate still going on in the other platforms threads. All I read is how much everyone hates categories and the new UI.
I’d personally like to hear more about what they intend to “fix”. It’s rather vague right now. If the “fix” for example is just to move back to showing all libraries without specifically picking a server first then that isn’t much of a fix and will still have a lot of confusion on hubs, finding playlists, etc
Personally, my vote (if we had that) would be to completely scrap the new UIs and go back to the “retro”/older UIs and build from that with fixes and enhancements needed.
I agree… I am worried about the fix being some half baked compromise but have committed myself to giving Plex a month to see what happens. Now that Plex retro is out there the hate from my family has died down enough to tolerate. Some specifics would go along way.
We generally sort by quality. But I know that we’re working on improved support for those sort of dual-quality scenarios.
at the moment.
