Server Version#: 1.25.5.5492
Player Version#: 1.40.1.2823-6f60f3a7
TL:DR:
I would like to be able to direct stream my average 5500kbps movie, which apparently has peaks of above 20mbps(according to the requiredbandwidths), but i would still be able to have transcodes limited to 8mbps 1080p.
is there a way of doing this?
I’m trying to get my plex servers quality up, currently I have movies with average around ~4500kbps.
Plex does some analysis magic and settles on: requiredBandwidths=“21249,18197,11399,7925,7861,7861,7861,7861” for example on my 5489kbps movie.
By reading the forums I learned that this is higher because peaks/overhead.
When someone is watching a movie(in the windows plex app), plex always looks at the highest value, in this case: 21249kbps.
How can I make it use one of the lesser values?, Can I increase the buffer somehow?
(If someone can explain why there are 8 different values that would also be nice).
The most likely answer to this is “that is not possible”, since I couldn’t find anything about it on the forum and there are a lot of posts about the requiredbandwidths already.
So I had a different question, so in this case, having a limit of 25mbps would allow direct play for my file.
But it would only need that bandwidth for a short time during the movie(I hope).
But if I were to set the remote stream limit to 25mbps and I would cast some HEVC content to a Chromecast that doesn’t support HECV, it would transcode the file to 25mbps wouldn’t it?
Is there a way of setting the transcode limit without affecting the stream limits?
Do you actually mean “Plex for Windows/Mac” or just the Plex Web app? There are major differences between these.
The buffer size of hardware players and appliances is determined by the restrictions of their hardware. You won’t be able to modify the buffer size of e.g. a Smart TV or of a Chromecast stick.
Dedicated Plex clients which run on Desktop operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux) may be more flexible in this regard.
Plex for Windows/Mac always uses the highest buffer size. Plex Media Player even allowed the buffer size to be configurable.
The 8 values relate to 8 different buffer sizes.
Those various numbers in requiredBandwidths are the required bitrates for 5,10,25,50,75,100,250,500MB large network buffer sizes.
Yes, but since Plex doesn’t know when and how often such a peak will occur during streaming, it has to reserve the full bandwidth which is allowed by your client’s network buffer size.
If there is not enough bandwidth available to meet these demands, the server has to employ transcoding. Either in real-time or by resorting to a pre-transcoded version of the item with lower bandwidth
You can only define a global bandwidth limit for the whole server under
Settings - Server - Remote Access
A client can have its own bandwidth limit. Most of them can have different numbers for local network versus remote access. (To be defined in the settings of each individual client)
Yes I meant the Plex for Windows application.
I had all my users switch to that because of HEVC support.
So for the above bandwidths: requiredBandwidths=“21249,18197,11399,7925,7861,7861,7861,7861”
it should pick 7861 when the buffer is >=75MB right?
However it always picks the first one, which means that there is a 5MB buffer.
A buffer of 5MB on a windows application seems absurdly small when I think most windows PC’s have at least 8GB of memory.
Could something else be wrong with my setup?
Pre-transcoding would probably solve this issue.
However, this would take up extra space, which I would like to avoid if I can.
I also did some testing, and it seems that on my system there is about a 100MB buffer.
It buffered about 2.5 minutes on my ~5500kbps movie.
150*5500kbps = ~103MB
While I would like a bigger buffer to always have the lowest required bandwidths, this should be enough for the 5th value in that list.
So there is some miscommunication between the actual buffer and the buffer that the server thinks the client has.
Thank you for your help, I’m not really familiar with reporting bugs to plex yet, is there anywhere where I could check the status of the bug report?
