Best Practices for transcoding over limited upload speed

Plex Media Server
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Hello all,

I have combed the web and the forums and reddit and everything, most of the information I find is unclear or outdated.

I have a PMS that is perfectly cable of transcoding multiple streams without breaking a sweat. However my upload speed is 5mbps soon to be upgraded to 10mbps.

My question is about setting limits in the Remote Access section of the settings.

Internet Upload Speed is obvious and will be filled with 5 or 10 after the upgrade.

The second setting “Limit remote stream bitrate” is what is unclear to me. Description below it states “Set the maximum bitrate of a remote stream from this server.” so my understanding is that this is per stream.

So if my upload speed is 5 and I set the limit of every stream to 2 I can accomodate 2 viewers.

Then I read something about Plex having implemented adaptive bitrate streaming and I was wondering whether let’s say: Global upload speed is 5 and limit is set to 4.

If one user is watching then all is good. If a second user jumps in the ideal would be to limit the 1st user to 2mbps and allocate another 2mbps to the 2nd user. Is this the case? Is this what adaptive bitrate is?

Because if that is how it works then limit should be set close to the upload speed.
If not then limit should be set to a much smaller number in order to accomodate two to three people which is a shame because if only one is watching he/she could watch at a much higher quality than the limit imposes.

I hope my question is clear. I can’t wait to be enlightened my the experts out there.

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Plex will only use about 80% of your limit for the actual stream to allow for overhead.

No. Adaptive bitrate is on the client end. When a new stream starts, it doesn’t affect previous streams. So in your example, user 1 will get 2 Mbps and user 2 will also get 2 Mbps, since that is the limit (total of 4 available). However, there is no room for a 3rd stream. With adaptive bitrate enabled on the client, those users can then go up and down depending on what is available at the time. i.e. If either user has it enabled and their internet d/l doesn’t handle 2 it can go down to 1.5. This then frees up 0.5 for a 3rd stream. If that 3rd stream connects, then there is no room to go up so the other users cannot go up anymore, but can still go down.

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