I am sure this has been asked before, yet i cannot find it. is there a option that allows plex to automatically downgrade the streams quality instead of buffering?
There is not.
The plex team is definitely aware of the demand for this feature (I want it too!), but due to limited resources and other, more pressing features, it hasn’t been worked on yet.
wow how is this not a easy thing to implement the logs already tell you if its going to take to long and buffer, they just need to add a event listener for that and reduce stream quality.
Likely is fairly complicated from a client side, to be able to take the stream in progress and know exactly when to change the device's internal decoding at just the right moment, without impacting the end user experience.
Likely is fairly complicated from a client side, to be able to take the stream in progress and know exactly when to change the device's internal decoding at just the right moment, without impacting the end user experience.
You know, I'd be ok w/ a fairly short 'changing stream' pop up once, to avoid buffering several times.
Not saying it'd be easy, but that might be acceptable.
As lenaxia mentioned, this is definitely a feature the team would love to be able to offer. Despite how simple it might *seem*, though, the actual technical aspects of it are far from simple when transcoding live video.
To be clear, the iOS app did attempt to do this for a while. Unfortunately, the results were, well, less than ideal. There's a reason that the feature was removed.
It's most definitely on our radar. Hopefully we'll be able to see it at some point because it would certainly be an awesome feature for anyone who has to stream content.
wow how is this not a easy thing to implement the logs already tell you if its going to take to long and buffer, they just need to add a event listener for that and reduce stream quality.
If you're streaming, you'd then have to switch to transcoding, and if you're transcoding, what happens if you're transcoded 10 minutes ahead and now have to start all over again. You have to kill the previous transcode sessions, start a new one. Now speed picks up again, you need to up the speed, kill the lower quality stream and restart the high quality stream. Do you try to pick up where it last left off? Or do you just start from scratch again? How much space does the server have to store multiple transcode streams? do we want to eat up that much space? Oh crap, the server is on a NAS? It can't even handle one transcode stream? well we're SOL. Now we've got 5 users streaming to different devices, oh their quality is changing a lot? now we've got 3-4 transcodes per user going at any given time.
It only gets worse. "It's easy" because someone behind the scenes at youtube is working their ass off putting together dynamic stream switching. Not to mention, Youtube doesn't transcode on the fly. It has fully transcoded versions of all levels of quality cached on their servers so switching is a simple matter for them. Plex doesn't have that luxury and just because you may have the space/power to hold/handle multiple transcodes at once, doesn't mean everyone else does nor does it make it easy to actually implement it.
Interesting read. It went from easy to impossible lol. Either way I would love it…
After a lot of mad science, this feature is now available in preview, starting with iPhone, iPad, Android mobile, and Apple TV.
@Gregflix said:
After a lot of mad science, this feature is now available in preview, starting with iPhone, iPad, Android mobile, and Apple TV.
Wow, I see it also keeps a buffer now (like YouTube does). Seems to fix a lot of buffering related issues here. Any plans to bring this buffer (or the auto quality for that matter) to Plex web and media player?
Thanks again, this is a great improvement.
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