I’ve seen this topic come up before; the most recent that I’ve found is from 2.5 years ago now; Restrict 4K Content
None of the options there are great, for me. The closest solution is to split movies and tag the 4K version, then exclude movies tagged with “4k” from sharing with other people. The problem with this is that I now have two versions of a bunch of movies in my collection, which I don’t want. I just want the single merged copy.
I’ve tried to teach my family and friends how to use the “Play Version” option, but they just don’t get it. Plus, most of them don’t have 4K devices anyway, and it’s ridiculous to have Plex transcode the 4K file down to 1080 or 720 when I already have a perfectly good 1080 copy of the movie in the library.
So is there some feature that’s appeared since 2018 that would allow me to filter out certain resolutions from sharing, or otherwise solve this issue? Is this even something that’s in the works?
Recent version of Windows, Android TV, Android Mobile and Roku players all seem to correctly select a 1080p version in preference to an existing 2160p version if the display is 1080p or less. As you noted, you can manually select playing the 2160p version which will of course have to transcode but it looks like just pressing “Play” works fine in all such cases.
My brother’s TV must have some old version of Plex or something (it’s a Vizio, I think, and the software hasn’t been updated since he bought it). It’s a 1080p TV, but I can see when he’s streaming that it’s transcoding the 4K version.
Even for people that have 4K tvs, though, my upstream just isn’t adequate if I have multiple people connected. That’s another reason I’d prefer the ability to tell Plex to only stream FHD or less.
Upstream bandwidth is an additional issue beyond 4k transcoding. There’s a configurable value in the Plex player clients for maximum Internet quality/bandwidth. Sounds like it needs to be set appropriately.
I’d also take a look at your PMS Remote Access settings for Internet upload speed and limit on the remote stream bit-rate to make sure they are set correctly
