What determines the “amount of outgoing bandwidth reserved for this playback session”?
I am referring to the number shown in the image below:
This number seems to vary very widely. It does not appear to reflect the bitrate of the source or the actual output of the physical server. Perhaps I misunderstand what this number is, but it does not seem to be accurate. The physical server has the same netout speed for files that have very different “amount of outgoing bandwidth reserved for this playback session” reported in the dashboard.
Has anyone else experienced this or know better what this number represents?
Plex reads the ‘Peaks and Valleys’.
There are 23Mbps Peaks in that encode - and Plex knows what those are, so it’ll know if a file will fit into the hole you want it plugged in to and if not - transcode.
Either change the way you encode, or acquire, or give Plex plenty of headroom.
Regarding this - a few users are digging into the details here - it may be of interest:
I’m not sure I follow. The server is barely breaking a sweat, and nothing is being transcoded is all direct play. It’s just that the dashboard reports numbers that don’t seem to reflect reality.
This encode was a constrained crf encode at ~10Mbps that I don’t believe includes spikes that high but perhaps it does and I don’t fully get how vbv works. However, it seems to happen with many different files, so I will confirm if it is happening or not with 2-pass encodes but I am pretty sure it is.
Thanks for the info and link to that other discussion!
Rest assured no matter if you use CQ or ABR there WILL be peaks that go a LOT higher than you think they do.
Reading the other discussion where I started it (it’s sort of enormous), will show you how to Limit the peaks, but keep in mind when you do that you limit HB or ffmpeg from encoding the peaks they think you need. They may be wrong, but you’ll not find out until you watch.
Personally, I encode a fairly starved bit rate, but allow HB to use whatever it thinks the scene needs. I encoded Deadwood at 1080p/2650kbps/ABR, but when we play it Plex says it’s 12Mbps. Fine with me, but I know it’s going to happen. I’m not alarmed when Plex says my files have a higher bit rate than I encoded them - 'cause some scenes do indeed have more bit rate.
Yeah, I’m still learning the whole encoding game, and experimenting. You can’t get something for nothing it seems and so my bitrate keep going up and up as I try to get as close to the source as I can while still saving space and being at a bitrate I can stream. 10Mbps HEVC is probably higher than what most people do and overkill and maybe not really worth it but trying to find a sweet spot I can settle on.
As for plex dashboard reporting the numbers it does, everything practically seems fine it’s just those numbers go up in the dashboard and the numbers for the physical server do not so it doesn’t seem to match. Does not bother me, but just seems off. I just tested several x264 2-pass encodes and it definitely happens with those files as well (all direct play). The last one I tested is ~12.3 Mbps, and Plex dashboard says 37Mbps.
My 1080p HEVCs are 1250Kbps - look great, don’t take a week to encode, but Plex says they’re 12Mbps.
An hour shows up at about 500Mb - so I don’t care what Plex says they are… I got what I wanted…lol
I use 1650Kbps for Movies - 1250Kbps for Shows - in HEVC.
It works for my eyeballs - and the geriatric wheelchair band of heathens in the group - so we’re good. You gotta do what you gotta do, but you may find out you can do a lot less.
Yeah I think I could do cutting in half on the bitrate. It’s just so hard to compare results and not want to encode the nicer one! I might need to join a support group for such people haha On the flip side, it’s great to have a ton of space for a ton of content, so… Maybe I’ll try doing something closer to your numbers and see if it could work for me. Thanks again.
Note I have User Profiles for all the possibilities - so it’s all Drag and Drop - and I can tweek a bit at the moment if the urge strikes.
The way I do it when I’m in ‘Discovery’ mode is to make a bunch of 240 Second ‘Previews’, name them what they are encoder-wise and plunk them into an Other Videos library to view on everything in the Plexiverse.
4 MInutes happens a lot faster than 18 hours - guaranteed…lol
4 Minutes also gives you a few scenes to look at - and you can ‘spot check’ different places in the video to check action scenes, static scenes, etc.
In the beginning I used to watch the bit rate.
Now I look at the material instead - and try not to think about the bit rate.
It took a while (10 years) to get here tho.
There is a set sequence of events that has to happen - how long it takes is wildly variable…lol
I looked at the xml file and I guess one thing that does not make sense to me is that the required bandwidth for the media seems to be the result of adding the video stream and all of the audio streams together get its total, which I would take that to mean I would be playing 2 audio streams at the same time in that case
But my question is more where the requiredBandwidth numbers come from. I did a test (everything direct play nothing transcoded) while watching another entire movie that was reported by plex dashboard to require 24Mbps. Analyzing the source file directly (not through plex) the bitrate for both audio and video streams is approximately 12Mbps. Analyzing the bandwidth usage of the server during playback (directly not through plex) the bandwidth never exceeded 12Mbps, so it would seem to me that 12Mbps is the correct number.
Even stranger now is that the same exact file I posted an image of the dashboard during playback in this thread initially is now reporting the correct Mbps but there have been zero changes to the file, the server, or the client. See below:
The only thing I can think is that some task in Plex has run during the last 24 hours that has corrected the number.
The other file that I was speaking about where it reported 24Mbps instead of 12Mbps a couple paragraphs up has not been on the server for 24 hours yet so maybe it will be correct tomorrow as well. I tried the option in Plex to “Analyze” the file to see if that would correct the number shown but to no avail.
That is the case when the file is Direct Played. Because then the file is sent as-is to the client. If there are more than one audio streams muxed-in, then these are sent as well. Simply because they are within the file.
