According to Plex, “Adjust Quality Automatically” should not impact anything if the video source does not need transcoded, correct? That isn’t my experience with the latest beta Plex on Windows and an Apple TV Plex app. Turning off the feature does a direct stream to my Apple TV when streaming Live TV. Turning it on forces a transcode. Am I not understanding the KB correctly?
Activating “auto quality” will cause transcoding right away. Because if the available bandwidth is later detected as being too low, playback cannot switch seamlessly to transcoding. It has to transcode right from the start. Only then it can adjust the target bitrate dynamically.
Thank you! Your explanation makes sense, but then is the documentation incorrect, or is my understanding wrong?
That’s not what the article says. Could you point me to the paragraph or sentence from where you draw your conclusion?
More the former than the latter.
A long, tedious conversation/debate about Auto-Quality revealed, at that time, a shortcoming in that AQ wouldn’t work at all if the item started in Direct Play.
The Answer - derived and implemented at some point - was to transcode everything if AQ is on.
The moral of this story is: if you want Direct Play, do something to get it, but don’t turn on AQ.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115007570148-automatically-adjust-quality-when-streaming/
The Plex apps only select auto quality in situations where a video already needs to be converted (transcoded) for playback. It does not interfere with playing videos at their original quality (sometimes called Direct Play or Direct Stream).
I’ve been speaking English for a while - and I can tell ya what that says, but not what Plex meant by it.
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Thank you! Your explanation is definitely helpful. And yes, that was the paragraph I was talking about. 
The behavior is fine outside of the home because Plex is going to transcode everything anyway because of bandwidth concerns, but if I enable this feature on four different phones that are “home” at the moment and they want to stream media, my CPU could likely get overloaded with all this transcoding when they wouldn’t normally need to transcode inside the home at all.
Hopefully at some point there will be a little more intelligence built into this. If the bandwidth is available, I would hope it would be smart enough to switch to Direct Play, even if it started by transcoding. Either that or maybe detect that it is “local” and not enable that feature for local media since the local network should normally be good.
Probably a few different ways to address it if/when that becomes a priority. Thanks again for the explanation!
I’m told that’s the pin that keeps the nade from blowing up in your pocket. Typically us ‘Users’ think it’s easy - when it’s probably not.
Coupled with this annoyance is Plex’s current inability to have the server and the remote client negotiate a quality that would allow Direct Play.
As it stands, Remote Quality is set in stone by default on ALL Plex Apps and locked in at 720p@4Mbps. Most Plex Users - I would think in this day and age - can support a LOT more remote quality than that and it’s the 'cause for nearly every single instance of unnecessary transcoding to a remote client.
Thow AQ into the mix - and you better have some Clydesdales in the barn.
In the end, with Today’s PlexTech - it pays to create/alter slightly as much content intended for Remote/Difficult Client playback as possible to facilitate Direct Play… so you don’t need AQ.
That may sound easier than it ends up being, but I’ve been doing ALL my content that way from Day One, so it’s notta big deal to me. Others will have other opinions, of course.
An Auto-Everything would be nice.
There ain’t one now.
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